


Majesty At My Doorstep

by emperors_girl



Series: The Choices That You Make [1]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Color Blindness, Families of Choice, Foster Care, M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-06 10:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 57,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11033889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emperors_girl/pseuds/emperors_girl
Summary: Alex is not the kind of kid who lives in houses with white picket fences. Alex is the kind of kid who’s had seven placements in five years. He was never, ever going to be able to stay.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of things before we begin:
> 
> 1\. Yes, I know Someone to Love the Both of Us still isn’t finished. I’m really, really sorry about that. Some crazy stuff happened in my life while I was writing that and I just wasn’t in a good place to go back to it (or to anything) until very recently. 
> 
> 2\. The idea behind this came from several places. While writing certain bits of Someone to Love the Both of Us, I kept thinking, “boy I wish Charles and Erik would adopt all of these kids and take them back to New York and live HEA!” But I also kept thinking, “hot damn I love Alex, he definitely needs more screen-time.” So this is… sort of a mash-up between those ideas. It’s Alex-centric but the “Charles/Erik love and babies” theme runs through the heart of it. To be clear, though, this isn’t Alex’s love story. That’s… something else entirely. 
> 
> 3\. This fic is completely finished and ready to be uploaded. I thought I’d do two chapters a week. In the meantime, I will do my very best to finish Someone to Love the Both of Us. I would have started with that in the first place, but I needed to do this first to clear my head. Thank you guys so much for sticking with me all this time!
> 
> 4\. This fic is about the US foster care system, which I've never been part of. I enjoy a fair bit of research as a part of the writing process, but I’m sure there are things here and there that just aren’t true. For those cases, we’ll just assume that it’s Charles in the background making people do what he wants for a good cause. Every foster child deserves parents like Erik and Charles, right?

The day Alex gets kicked out of his seventh placement in five years is one of the worst he’s ever experienced. Not the absolute worst (that honor goes to the day his parents died), but it’s definitely up there in the top five. For one thing, he wakes up with the cramps from hell. 

He also wakes up naked. And in his foster brother’s bed. And with his foster parents standing over the two of them looking pissed.

So… yeah. Not a great start to the morning.

The worst part is, they don’t yell at him about it. Alex could take that – he gets yelled at a lot and knows how to handle it. Instead, they give him looks, like he’s the fucking dirt under their shoes or something. Alex hates that, and he hates them for it.

Todd, of course, is no fucking help. Alex knew he wouldn’t be if it ever came to this. Todd-fucking-Blanding, with his damn perfect face and his stupid gorgeous body. Alex hates him so much and the thing he hates most is how Todd never wanted Alex like Alex wanted him. _Any port in a storm_ , that’s Todd’s motto, and even Alex will do, but Todd’s made it clear from the beginning that he’ll jump ship and blame Alex for the whole thing if his parents ever find out.

And maybe that’s not someone Alex should have gone to bed with. But… well, Alex is an idiot, everyone knows that, and sometimes he gets an itch inside that his fingers alone just can’t scratch. So he did what he did and tried to act like it wasn’t going to come crashing down around his ears. 

So, okay, maybe put like that this whole thing is kind of Alex's fault. But fuck the Blandings if they think he’s going to take this lying down.

That’s why when Todd says, “What are you doing here? Get out of my bed, you pervert!” Alex turns around and says, “Oh like you weren’t begging to fuck me in it three hours ago!”

And that’s pretty much the end of that placement.

Breakfast after that is not what Alex would call a good time. Mr. and Mrs. Blanding give him the stink eye while he stuffs Cheerios into his mouth. He doesn't feel much like eating but if he's getting moved to a new placement today, who knows where and when his next meal is going to happen. That's one thing he learned early on in the system: get your food while you can.

They send him off to school early to get rid of him while they call his social worker. Fine by Alex; not like he wants to stick around and get judged any longer than necessary. He grabs up his book bag and hoofs it the few blocks to the school, thinking, _good fucking riddance_. 

Homeroom after that is a nightmare of noise and smells and nausea, so Alex skips his first two classes to hide in the bathroom and puke. He'd blame his upset stomach on stress or something from the way the morning’s been going so far, but well… he's actually been like this for like three weeks – sick in the mornings and evenings, and tired all the hours in between. He doesn't know what it means and he's honestly not that invested in finding out. Probably he’s dying. He’s not sure he would mind it at this point. Keeling over in the middle of class would be a fantastic way to round out the day.

XXXXX

Alex is in no way surprised to find his caseworker waiting for him after school. The Blandings, of course, didn’t feel the need to give him any warning about it, but after where they found him this morning, Alex doesn’t need it spelled out. This is his seventh placement in five years – he knows the signs by now.

“Hey, Alex,” Moira says from her place at the kitchen table. There's a familiar scuffed duffle bag sitting on the floor at her feet. Alex doesn't say anything to Moira, just grabs the bag and checks to make sure all his stuff is inside. 

The important stuff is all there: the photo album with pictures of his parents’ wedding and him as a little kid, the handful of kids’ books his parents used to read to him before bed, the banged-up teddy bear he’s had since he was two that he’s way too fucking old to still be carting around. There’s even the charger for the shitty phone he’d scrounged to buy at the placement before this one. There are also fifteen mismatched socks, eight pairs of boxer shorts, and his single spare set of jeans. None of his uniform polos or khakis have made into the bag.

Alex glares up at Moira. He still doesn’t say anything, but she’s got that caseworker magic where she can tell what he’s thinking without him even opening his mouth.

“The Blandings have made the point that the clothes you’ve been wearing are a school uniform,” she tells him. Her smile looks painful. “You won’t be able to use them anywhere else.”

Alex grits his teeth and balls his hands into fists. He can feel himself getting pissed off. He hates that stupid uniform, but they’re _his_ clothes, damn it! The state paid for _him_ to keep them, not for the stupid Blandings to give them to the next kid they get in here to replace him.

Fuck the Blandings.

“I’m sorry,” Moira says. “I know how hard this is for you.”

But if she really knew and she really cared then she would do something about it. This is the second damn time this has happened to Alex, the second time in a row he’s left a placement with nothing but the clothes on his back and it’s bullshit!

“I’m sorry, Alex,” she tells him again, as if that just makes everything all better. “But I already had to talk them out of pressing sexual assault charges. We… we really don’t want that to happen, alright? We’ll get you something to wear.”

“Those were my clothes,” Alex hisses. His breath is coming in short, sharp gasps now and he can feel a prickling behind his eyes. He might… God he might actually be about to cry. What the hell is wrong with him today?

“We’ll get you more,” Moira promises.

Alex takes a deep, shaky breath. He’s got to get his act together.

“Whatever,” he manages to say at last. He zips the bag back up. He’d rather be naked than wear anything the Blandings bought him, anyway. Fuck the Blandings and especially fuck Todd. Alex doesn’t need any of them. 

Alex can take care of himself.

XXXXX

Moira takes Alex back to her office (and for office, read cubicle), where he sits on a plastic chair for a few hours and watches her make phone calls. He hates being here and he hates how many times it’s come to this. He’s been in this chair so many times now that he doesn’t need Moira to explain she’s trying to find him a place to stay tonight. Usually she tries to get something lined up before she takes him out of the previous placement, but sometimes the fosters are dicks about it and don’t want him around for even another night. Sometimes Moira tells them that’s tough and rules are rules, but this time she’s obviously decided it’s more important to get him away from anyone who wants to accuse him of fucking rape.

So now Alex has nowhere to go. Not for the first time, and it won’t be the last. He’s not really surprised about it. Placements don’t just grow on trees, as Moira is constantly telling him, and Alex has a reputation by this point. Lots of fosters won’t take kids that have ever been in any trouble, and Alex’s brief run-in with the law (the one that got him kicked out of the place before the Blandings) closed a lot of doors. He’s also sixteen now, which is apparently the age where people stop seeing you as a kid that might someday be their kid, and start seeing you instead as a lost cause.

Alex has always known he’s a lost cause, but it’s nice to have the reminder.

So Moira makes some phone calls and then she makes even more phone calls. Alex screws around on his phone and tries not to listen in as people tell her they don’t have room for him or just outright don’t want him in their houses.

The room they’re in is ridiculously warm, probably from all the people hanging around and talking. Alex’s head starts to pound at around the two-hour mark. It doesn’t help that the lady two cubicles over seems to be wearing the world’s strongest perfume. Eventually Alex can’t take the smell anymore and has to split to the bathroom.

The bathroom is empty, thankfully. Alex splashes some water on his face and stares at his pasty reflection in the mirror, telling himself not to throw up. If he throws up, his head might explode, and if that happens, Moira’s going to be really pissed, especially after all the work she’s putting in to finding him somewhere to go. He breathes through his nose and looks himself right in the eyes. He will not puke. He will _not puke_.

He pukes. Right in the sink and everything. It burns like a bitch coming up and makes his nose sting. His head does not explode, but just barely. Still hurts like a motherfucker. He’ll admit to shedding a few manly tears at the pain.

All Alex wants in the world right now, he decides, is to lie down in a dark room on a soft bed with a cool cloth on his forehead. But he can’t, because he doesn't have a room. He’s got nowhere to stay and no one wants him. 

Story of his life.

When Alex gets back to Moira's desk fifteen minutes later, he finds her shrugging on her jacket, keys in hand.

“Good news,” she says when she sees him, and the way she’s smiling tells him it really is good news; she’s not just putting on a brave face for him.

Still, he can’t bring himself to get too excited about it. The last place with the Blandings had been “good news” too at the beginning, and look how badly Alex has fucked that up. But at least this will be somewhere to sleep. And if it ends up not being as good as Moira thinks, Alex is old enough by now to take care of himself – he can always chance it on the streets.

Alex sighs and grabs his bag. 

“Let’s get this over with.”

XXXXX

Moira tells him about the placement on the car ride over.

“They’re a really nice couple,” she starts, which doesn’t exactly fill Alex with confidence. “Both college professors. They have three kids: two fosters and one biological.”

And oh great, that’s just what Alex needs to make his day better. The other fosters are whatever – Alex doesn’t care about them unless they touch his stuff. Bio-kids, though? They’re the worst. Alex has never met a bio-kid who didn’t fuck him over in the end. Todd Blanding is obviously the worst-case scenario – fucked Alex over and just plain fucked him – but he’s not the only awful bio-kid Alex has ever come across. There was a girl three placements ago who would trash her mom’s stuff and then blame Alex. And of course parents always believe their own flesh-and-blood kids over some random foster they just barely let into the house.

Moira glances at Alex. “You okay with that?”

“Whatever,” Alex says, because it doesn’t make a difference at this point what he wants. If he’s ever had any control over his life, it’s long gone these days. He goes where they tell him and stays where they put him. For now, anyway.

They drive in silence for a while. Alex stares out the window and watches as the neighborhoods get progressively nicer.

“Where the fuck are we going?” he asks at last.

Moira frowns about the language, but she doesn’t yell at him.

“Woodlawn Heights,” she says.

Alex whips around to stare at her. “You didn’t tell me they were rich!”

Moira glances at him, eyebrow raised.

“Does it matter?”

How could it not? Alex can’t meet rich people when he’s just puked in a social worker’s bathroom. He can’t meet rich people at all, but especially not looking like this. There’s no way they’re going to take him in when he’s got the fucking plague or something. They’re going to take one look at him and shut the door in his face.

“You’ll be fine,” Moira says.

Well, easy for her to say. She’s not the one who has nowhere else to go.

Alex spends the rest of the drive clenching and unclenching his hands, trying not to hyperventilate or throw up again. It’s not working so well. His heads starts to spin.

Then, way too fucking soon, they’re pulling up alongside a huge house with an actual fucking white picket fence. Alex’s mouth goes dry. He tries to swallow, fails. He can’t do this. He definitely can’t go up to a house that looks like that and tell them he deserves to stay here. Alex is not the kind of kid who lives in houses with white picket fences. Alex is the kind of kid who’s had seven placements in five years.

“Get out of the car, Alex,” Moira says.

Alex doesn’t move.

“Out now,” Moira says, and that’s the voice that means she’s losing her patience. Alex knows that tone; he gets it just about every time they meet.

Alex’s hands are shaking when he opens the door and climbs out. Moira comes around the front of the car, and Alex reluctantly follows her through the gate and up the walk. She knocks on the door twice in quick succession. Alex holds his breath.

The man who opens the door is tall and thin, dressed in a black sweater. He’s got a baby on his hip. His face is very serious. This is not the type of man you fuck with.

“Moira,” the man says in greeting. 

And then he looks right at Alex and grins.

And that’s it. That’s all she wrote. Alex doesn’t even know he’s going to do it, and then bam! – he’s suddenly doubled over, hands on his knees, puking into the grass.

Before he even straightens up, Alex knows already: this placement is not going to end well.


	2. Chapter 2

When Alex finally gets his breath back enough to wipe his mouth with his sleeve and straighten up, he sees the scary guy and Moira are both watching him. Moira looks concerned, eyes flicking nervously between Alex and the man, as though she’s afraid this might be a deal-breaker. The man doesn’t look like this is a deal breaker, nor does he say anything about Alex throwing up all over his perfectly-green, well-kept yard. His look is what Alex might call _considering_. It’s better than the smile, but not by much. A part of Alex hopes this actually is a deal breaker, because he doesn’t think he can make his legs move enough to walk into that house with this man.

Moira says, “Uh, hi Erik. Is Charles around?”

The scary guy – Erik – frowns. Alex whimpers.

“No,” he says flatly. And then, “Come in.”

He stands aside and motions them through the door. Alex doesn’t want to move, but Moira knows him too well. She grabs his shirt and manhandles him inside. The house is nice inside – pretty much exactly what Alex expected from the curbside view. His shoes scuff on the shiny hardwood floors and for a minute he’s torn about whether or not he should kick them off. But Moira leaves hers on so Alex does the same.

This place is swanky, and that probably does not bode well for Alex. There aren’t even any toys scattered around the place, which is weird for a foster placement. The only indication any kids live here at all, apart from the baby on Erik’s hip, is a couple of cork boards on the far wall filled with crayon drawings and graded math tests. 

Christ, what kind of a front are these people putting on? It has to all be for Moira’s sake. That’s how you play the system, Alex knows that by now: you put on your most parent-y expressions and parade your fosters out for the caseworker’s approval, and then you go back to ignoring them the minute the caseworker’s gone. But these people are doing it wrong – it’s always better to have more toys visible. And more kids. Prove you’re not keeping them chained in the basement or whatever. The caseworkers always want to see the kids playing or doing homework or in some other way being quiet and productive. The least this guy could have done is get the other fosters into the room.

Erik leads the way further into what must be the living room, where he gestures for Alex and Moira to have a seat on one of the dark leathery couches. Alex sits gently on the edge of his cushion, still uncomfortably aware of how sweaty and gross he is.

Moira immediately pulls her bag onto her lap and begins to rifle through the papers inside, probably looking for Alex’s pedigree (he’s very well-bred, apparently). Erik doesn’t sit, but goes over to a shelf at the far side of the room. He fishes around for a second in one of the baskets there, his back to them, and when he turns around he’s got a white cloth in his hand.

“Here,” he says, throwing the cloth in Alex’s direction. Alex definitely isn’t ready for it, and it’s only startled instinct that has him catching the cloth before it hits the ground.

It’s a little soft white towel-thing with suspicious orange stains on it. It’s obviously been recently washed, and Alex waits for the detergent smell to make him sick again (that’s been happening a lot recently; he thinks he might have an allergy or something), but nothing happens. Weird.

“The hell is this?” he asks, forgetting for a minute that he’s supposed to be scared.

“Alex,” Moira hisses, and that’s when Alex realizes he’s been swearing again. Whoops.

Erik doesn’t seem to mind, taking the leather chair opposite the two of them and shifting the baby onto his lap. The baby starts to make a bunch of silly baby-noises, and they’re super loud even with the binky blocking his mouth (which is actually pretty impressive, if you ask Alex).

“That,” Erik says once the baby is settled, “is a spit up cloth. For little ones who drink too much. Make use of it.”

Alex scowls. “I’m not hungover,” he mutters, but he wipes his face and hands off anyway.

There’s an awkward moment of silence where Erik just stares at him with a raised eyebrow and Alex tries not to meet his eyes. He doesn’t know what this guy’s deal is (besides being fucking scary-looking) and he doesn’t especially want to find out.

At last Moira cuts through the tension by clearing her throat and saying, “I suppose I should explain why we’re here. I spoke to Charles on the phone about an hour ago-”

“Yes,” Erik cuts in, mouth curling up into a mean-looking smile. It’s still scary, but at least there are no teeth involved this time. “I’m aware. Charles and I don’t keep secrets from one another, as you know. This must be our wayward charge.”

Moira’s smile becomes more fixed in a way Alex has never seen before. She looks kind of like she’s swallowed a lemon. “Yes,” she says tightly. “This is Alex Summers. Alex, meet Erik Lehnsherr.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Alex,” Erik says, and he doesn’t quite sound like he means it, but Alex thinks maybe that’s just the way he talks. Either that, or he really _doesn’t_ mean it and this Charles guy, whoever that is, signed Erik on for this placement without getting Erik’s okay and now Erik’s just going through with it to keep face.

His accent, Alex notices suddenly, is kind of weird. European, maybe, or something like that. 

“Yeah,” Alex says, and he can’t think of anything else to say, so he adds, “Whatever.”

Erik narrows his eyes, and for a second Alex thinks he’s really fucked this up somehow. Then Erik says, “Go wash up. Bathroom is up the stairs to the left. Then we’ll meet the children.”

Alex hesitates. He thinks about refusing – just for the hell of it, just because he can. But… he really does feel fucking gross even after using the cloth and he doesn’t want to meet anyone else looking like this. So he goes.

The upstairs is no less fancy than the downstairs, but at least there are toys up here. Alex peeks into a few rooms (though he makes sure no one’s around first and also makes sure to be quick about it because the last thing he wants is to get in trouble for snooping this early on). 

There are five bedrooms up here, seems like, and all the doors are open, which means Alex really isn’t doing anything wrong by sticking his head into each one. There’s a girl’s room (one kid’s bed with princess sheets, stuffed animals everywhere, posters of really evil-looking fairy-queen-things on the walls, and also fluffy clouds and raindrops and even lightning bolts hanging from the ceiling).

This room must belong to the bio-kid, he thinks, eyeing all the toys. 

Except… maybe not, because then he peers into the next room – a boy’s – which has just as much stuff as the first (bunk beds, a soccer ball and a guitar on the floor, a bunch of model planes on shelves, and also one huge-ass stuffed bat, for reasons Alex can’t possibly imagine). 

It occurs to Alex that maybe Moira's got her facts wrong. Is it possible that two bio-kids live here? These rooms can't belong to foster kids. The state just doesn't pay enough for all the fancy toys and stuff. There's no money for it, even if the foster parents are willing to buy them – which they aren't, in Alex's experience. Bio-kids get new toys and foster kids make do with hand-me-downs. 

Moving on, Alex sees the next room is a nursery, probably for the kid downstairs. It's got babyish stuff in it (a crib and a rocking chair and baby toys all over the floor). Next to that is what must be the parents’ room (boring but clean). The last room Alex checks is some kind of guest room or something (clean, too, and mostly empty except for a bed and a dresser).

Alex spends a minute looking at all the rooms, trying to puzzle them out. Then he realizes he’s loitered too long and takes himself into the bathroom quick before anyone can come looking for him. He does what he can for his appearance – he washes his face and his hands and tries to get his hair to lay flat (and holy shit, he definitely needs a haircut). He rinses his mouth out, too, and that makes him feel a bit better about the whole thing.

He doesn’t want to go back downstairs where Erik and Moira are definitely waiting for him (he kind of wants to just find a dark corner and lay the fuck down and sleep forever), but who knows what these people do when you disobey. Alex can’t chance it so soon after getting here.

Still, his knees wobble as he makes himself tromp down the stairs. 

Erik and Moira are both standing, he sees when he gets into the living room, and this must be it: Moira’s out of here and Alex is going to be on his own.

He sighs. It was bound to happen eventually. Time to see what this Erik guy is like when a caseworker isn’t watching over his shoulder.

“Alex,” Moira says, “call me if you need anything. Do you still have my number?”

Alex does.

“Okay,” she says, and swings her bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll check up on you next week, alright?”

Alex shrugs.

Erik walks her to the door while Alex stands awkwardly by the couch, trying not to look like he’s worried. He’s not worried, he just knows how this kind of thing goes. Best case scenario, Erik loses interest pretty quick and lets Alex do his own thing. Worst case scenario… well, Alex doesn’t want to think about that.

When Erik comes back, he says, “The children are downstairs in the playroom.”

“Right,” Alex says, and follows Erik down a different set of stairs into the basement.

The playroom has a dark carpet, a couch (not leather this time), a television, and all the toys Alex was expecting to see upstairs. It all makes sense now: these are the type of rich people who like to keep their mess out of sight. They keep the mess and the kids down in the basement where they won't ruin the property value or whatever.

There’s a boy and a girl down here, and Alex can’t tell right away which one is the bio-kid. Or maybe neither is and it’s actually the baby. That would really make the most sense. Common story, you hear it often enough: couple has trouble having a baby so they adopt or foster instead, and then bam! – the second they’re not trying, they pop out a kid on their own.

One thing’s for sure: neither of these kids looks anything like Erik. So unless the foster mom, Erik’s wife, has dark or extremely pink skin like either of these kids, it’s probably the baby. That scenario actually makes it easier for Alex in some ways: less competition with the older kids and the baby was going to get all the love anyway, even if it was a foster. People love babies, it's a fact of life.

“This is Ororo,” Erik says, gesturing to a little girl reading on the couch, the one with the darker skin. She’s maybe ten or eleven and her hair is really freaking weirdly white. Not like blonde-white. Like serious pure-white. It’s strange.

The girl - Ororo – looks up from her book and smiles at Alex, but something about the look in her eyes makes Alex sure she’s one to watch out for.

“And this is Sean,” Erik says, pointing at the pink-skinned redhead boy around Alex’s age who has a game controller in his hand and his eyes fixed on a television screen.

Sean doesn’t look over, but he says, “Hey, man!” in a happy kind of way.

The baby squeals shrilly at Sean’s words and makes grabby hands in his direction.

“And David, of course,” Erik adds, and readjusts the baby in his arms.

“Let me hold him, Daddy,” Ororo says.

Erik looks at her silently, eyebrow raised, and she hurriedly adds, “Please.”

That seems to satisfy him, but it makes Alex’s stomach clench for some reason. Nerves, probably.

Erik puts David in Ororo’s lap. The baby seems happy enough with that, reaching up to grab the necklace she’s wearing. She doesn’t seem to mind, even when he puts it straight into his mouth, which Alex thinks is kind of gross. But it just proves his point: people love babies. 

Alex doesn't know if he himself likes babies. He’s honestly never been around one long enough to find out. The closest he’s ever come to being a big brother was way back when his parents were still alive and trying for another kid. It hadn't worked out, though, and they'd been dead a year later anyway. Since then the youngest kids he’s been around since have been elementary-schoolers. 

Alex doesn’t know if this is the kind of place where they expect you to watch the younger kids. He's been there before and he hadn't been terrible at it or anything. But he's also been in the type of home where they don't even want you to look at the little kids for too long, let along touch them. It's a tossup for which way this is going to go. Alex will have to wait and watch, and hopefully he figures it out before he gets himself into trouble.

Erik says, “Have you eaten, Alex?”

Alex hasn’t.

Erik says, “Do you eat chicken?”

Alex does.

Erik says, “Dinner will be in half an hour.”

Then he turns and walks away, leaving Alex alone again with people he doesn't know and doesn't know if he _wants_ to know.

XXXXX

Alex spends the next thirty minutes sitting out of the way, watching the others. They don’t say much to him, which is fine – Alex didn’t come here trying to make friends, anyway. The redhead, Sean, keeps his eyes on his video game (some kind of first person fighter thing Alex doesn’t know), occasionally muttering things like, “nice!” or “oh crap!” The girl, Ororo, lets David crawl all over her and she talks to him, but too quiet for Alex to hear. It’s not exactly a good time for Alex, but at least they’re not ganging up on him. Yet.

Eventually, there’s the sound of what must be the front door closing upstairs and all of the kids look up, even the baby, who also decides it’s a good time to start making those loud squealing sounds again.

“Professor’s home,” Sean says, and that must be the signal to put away toys and turn off games, because they both start cleaning up. It takes Alex a confused minute of watching them before he remembers that Moira said both Erik and his wife are college professors. That must mean the “Professor” who just came in upstairs is the foster mom. She must be pretty strict if Sean and Ororo are hurrying to get up there. That does not bode well for Alex. He would have sworn Erik would be the strict one, with his quiet, serious voice and his mean smile, but these two barely looked up when Erik came into the room and now they’re all in a rush, so the mom must somehow be even worse than Erik.

This placement is not going to end well.

Alex stands up in a hurry, trying to figure out if he should go up now and make himself look better by being first, or if he should wait for the others and try to blend in with the crowd. Probably better to wait, especially if there are customs he doesn’t know. If they’ve all got to line up in a row Sound of Music-style or something like that, the only way he’s going to know is if the other kids do it first. Alex will have to keep watching and waiting.

After his game is turned off, Sean looks around and spots Alex.

“Oh,” he says, frowning, and Alex tenses, ready for a fight. Except then Sean finishes his sentence with, “When did you get here?”

Alex stares at him. His first instinct tells him this is a trick somehow, like this kid is going to make Alex look stupid or something. But on the other hand, there's nothing mean in Sean's face, just wide eyes and a puzzled frown. Maybe, just maybe, Sean is one of those people who gets really into his video games and auto-pilots everything else while he's playing. Alex has seen that happen to people before.

Alex decides to take his question at face value.

“Like an hour ago. You said hey when I came down.”

“Oh,” Sean says again. He laughs a little, but it doesn't sound mean. 

Alex finds himself relaxing at the sound. It doesn't seem like he's going to have to fight this kid, and that's good. Not that Alex is afraid - he's definitely not. But fights always mean social workers get called, and Moira would absolutely kill him if he made her come back out tonight to deal with that shit.

“Well,” Sean says, still smiling, “Come on, man. Dinner time, and the professor will want to meet you.”

“Right,” Alex says, and swallows hard, trying not to think about how mean the professor might end up being. 

He trails up the stairs after the others. Ororo still has the baby in her arms, and Alex accidentally makes eye contact with the little guy. The kid stares at Alex with big intense eyes, and Alex looks away quickly, wondering if that's normal baby behavior.

It smells like food upstairs and for a second Alex can’t tell if he’s really hungry or really queasy. He breathes through his mouth, just in case. He really, really can’t afford to throw up again so soon, especially not when Erik hasn’t said anything yet about the puke puddle outside. Maybe if Alex is really good tonight, they can just forget the whole thing ever happened.

There are voices coming from the kitchen. Neither one of them sounds very much like a foster mom should, but who the hell else could be in there with Erik? If the professor in question isn't Erik’s wife, then where the heck is she and who else is coming to dinner?

Ororo, Sean and the baby all head into the kitchen. Alex follows behind them, dragging his feet as much as he dares. He stops short when he gets through the door and takes in the scene.

He doesn’t quite know what he expected from “the professor”, but it's almost certainly not what he actually sees: a twenty-something guy with brown hair, blue eyes, and a huge-ass smile, talking animatedly to Erik, who nods along absently and glares down at the pan on the stove.

“Uh,” Alex says, confused and a little nervous. The conversation stops as everyone turns to look at him.

“Oh,” the new guy says, “You must be Alex. What a pleasure to meet you!”

His voice is loud and happy and also British, for some reason.

“Uh,” Alex says again, really confused. Who the fuck is this guy?

“Oh, forgive me,” the man says cheerily. “I haven’t introduced myself. Charles Xavier.”

He takes a step toward Alex, hand outstretched to shake.

Alex takes it without really knowing why.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Charles says again, and he sounds so fucking sincere. Alex realizes suddenly that he really, really wants to like this guy, and that should probably be a warning sign. He's learned over the years that if someone seems too nice, it’s usually a trick. No one is as nice as this guy is acting. There has to be a catch.

“Now then, Alex,” Charles says, drawing his hand back, “would you mind helping Sean set the table? And Ororo, darling – here, I’ll take David – could you please fetch a fresh bib from the laundry?”

Sean says, “Here, Alex,” and Alex turns to see him standing by an open cupboard, grabbing down plates. He hands them off to Alex, who takes them and then just stands there awkwardly, unsure what to do next. 

Sean looks over at him and says, “Oh, right. Sorry, man. Forgot you were new. Put one at each chair. But not the highchair. I'll get the silverware.”

Together they manage to get the table set up by the time Ororo comes back with a bib for the baby. Then Charles straps the kid into his highchair and Erik carries over the pan from the stove.

Erik says, “Sit,” in his scary, demanding voice and you better believe Alex gets his ass into a chair ASAP. He finds himself sitting between Sean on one side and the baby on the other. Not too bad. At least he's not next to Erik.

The pan ends up being some kind of chicken casserole thing, and there's bread to go with it. They're supposed to serve themselves, Alex finds out right away, and that's actually almost worse than having someone else put stuff on his plate like they did at the Blandings. Oh, it sounds good in theory, getting to choose how much and what bits you want. But Alex can't shake the feeling that everyone is watching him scoop casserole into his plate, and they're all taking note of how much he takes. It's a double-edged sword, that, because if Alex takes too much, he’ll look greedy and that’ll get him into trouble, but if he doesn’t take enough, Erik might take it as an insult, and Alex will _still_ end up in trouble. 

Needless to say, he's sweating bullets the entire time the serving spoon is being passed around. Luckily, Sean and Ororo both get it before Alex, and Alex can watch their serving size and copy it for himself. His hands still shake as serves himself, but no one calls him on it, so he classifies it as a success. 

After that nerve-wracking few minutes, Alex manages to calm himself down enough to tune in to the dinner conversation. Charles mostly dominates the table talk, telling them all about his day and asking Sean and Ororo about theirs.

Charles _is_ a professor, it turns out, and he apparently works at the same university as Erik. That doesn't really explain what he's doing here for dinner or why he's taken Erik's wife's spot at the table, though. The thing is, Charles isn't acting like a dinner guest. No, he's acting more like he's running the show, and it makes Alex remember that Moira had mentioned a guy named Charles when she'd dropped him off.

So who is this guy, and what's his deal? Is he Erik's brother or something? That would make sense, sort of, but Charles and Erik don't really look anything alike. Both of them have weird kind of accents, but they’re not weird in the same way, so actually they're probably not related. 

What else could they be, though? Alex racks his brain trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for who these two guys are to one another, but with family off the table he doesn’t know what options are left. 

It’s not like they’re homos or something.

It takes Alex a long moment to realize the table has gotten way too quiet. He looks up from his plate warily to find Charles staring right at him. Alex panics for a quick minute, thinking he's somehow missed someone asking him a question or something. But no, that can't be it, because no one but Charles is looking at Alex. Everyone else is looking at _Charles_ , and their faces are weird – almost worried.

“Are you alright?” Erik asks quietly, and his expression is gentle in a way that Alex had no idea it could be.

Ororo says, “Papa, are you still sick?”

And… wait a second – _Papa_? Just what the fuck is going on here? How can Charles be her Papa if Erik is her Dad? They can’t be… surely they’re not _really_ homos. Right?

“No, darling,” Charles tells her, not looking away from Alex. “I’m fine.”

His fingers brush against his temple like maybe he’s got a headache. Beside him, Erik blinks and then picks up his fork again, using his spare hand at the same time to scatter more chunks of watermelon onto the baby’s highchair tray. The baby seemed very pleased with that, immediately grabbing one and shoving his whole fist into his mouth. Alex isn’t sure how he manages to open his fist in there, but he must do it somehow because his hand is empty when he brings it back out. Alex has never watched a baby feed itself before, and all he can think is that it’s very bizarre. Just like this whole place.

Charles says, “Alex, have the children shown you around the place?”

Alex doesn’t know what the right answer is. He says, “Uh…”

“No worries, if not,” Charles goes on. He gives Alex a smile, not as friendly as the one earlier, but he doesn’t seem mad. It still makes Alex's stomach sink, and he's not sure why. 

“Erik and I can show you around after we’re done here.”

“Uh, thanks,” Alex manages to say. He really, really hopes this conversation ends soon so these people will all stop looking at him.

Mercifully, Charles launches into another story about his work day, and everyone else at the table goes back to hanging on his every word. Alex breathes a sigh of relief. 

He manages, after that, to make it through the rest of dinner without any incidents. Charles continues to be funny and amiable even when he’s talking about nothing in particular, like when he and Ororo make bizarrely delighted chitchat about the weather forecast, or when he details to Sean rumors he’s overheard about an expansion at the zoo. He even manages to draw Erik out of his moody silence, and that’s got to be some kind of medal-worthy accomplishment.

Alex starts to get nervous again as the meal draws to its close. For one thing, he doesn’t know the etiquette here. At the Blandings, they’d had to ask to be excused, and before that, it’d been a long while since anyone made Alex sit down to family dinner. Are Charles and Erik expecting him to ask to leave? Are they going to expect him to do the dishes afterward? That had always been his chore at the Blandings, and Mrs. Blanding would come in afterward to inspect (and God forbid she find one spot or smudge).

Just as he’s working himself up into genuine dread about the whole thing, Charles sets down his fork and says, “Ororo, my darling, would you kindly show Alex where to put his plate?”

Ororo gives Alex a look like she doesn’t see why she has to be the one to show the new guy what to do, but she dutifully says, “Yes, Papa.” Alex watches her carefully, not wanting to miss a single thing that might get him into trouble later, but all she does is take her plate to the sink, rinse it off, and put it in the dishwasher. And oh – a dishwasher! Must be nice to be fucking rich, that’s all Alex has to say on the matter. 

Of course, just as soon as Alex starts thinking nice thoughts about this place, Charles has to ruin it by saying, “Ororo, Sean, would you two be kind enough to nip over to Raven’s with some of David’s old clothes? She called this morning to say little Kurt’s outgrown his sleepers again.”

Sean, who’s taking his turn at the sink, turns around in a flurry, face all lit up, and says, “Can we take the car?” 

Charles says, “Absolutely not,” but he’s still smiling.

If it were Alex asking, he’d take that answer at face value since he’s not freaking suicidal. Obviously no one’s ever taught Sean any self-preservation skills, though, because he turns big wet eyes on Erik and says, “Please?”

Alex’s breath catches in his throat as Erik’s mouth curls into one of his mean smiles. Holy shit, is this kid nuts? They’re in for it now, all of them.

Erik says, “Of course you can. If you can get the door open, that is.”

Sean’s mouth drops open in disbelief. 

Then Erik adds, “Without breaking the windows.”

That seems like it should have been obvious, but it takes Sean by surprise for some reason, and his happy-shocked expression turns into a pout.

“Someday,” he says, eyes narrowing, “I’m going to learn how to pick locks. You just watch me.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Erik returns.

“Raven can help you with that,” Charles cuts in. “You’d better go ask her now before it gets dark. The bag with the clothes is in the hall. Please and thank you, darlings.”

Sean sighs, then shrugs. Apparently he does know when to quit, after all.

“Come on, Ro,” he says, and together he and Ororo leave the room.

Alex is… pretty confused, honestly. He’d thought for sure that shit was about to hit the fan when Sean didn’t take no for an answer. The Blandings would have never put up with that shit. He’s not sure why Erik, who looks about as strict as they come, just played along like that, especially when he was wearing that mean smile.

“They’re lovely children,” Charles says quietly. Alex isn’t sure which of them he’s talking to.

“Yes,” Erik agrees. “Almost… exceptional.”

It must an old joke between them, because it doesn’t really make sense in the situation, but Erik and Charles grin at each other anyway.

“Now then,” Charles says, turning his grin back onto Alex. “Shall we have that tour?”

They take Alex around the ground floor, to rooms he’s seen and ones he hasn’t. Charles plays narrator as they pass through the living room, the kitchen, the laundry, and the office, where apparently Charles and Erik do their professor-type homework. They show him the porch and backyard – swanky as fuck! – and the basement, which is equipped with a “study nook” that Alex had been too nervous to notice earlier. 

After that, the three of them go upstairs, where Charles points out each of the rooms to him, and Alex tries to pretend he’s never seen the inside of them before. The boy’s room belongs to Sean, the girl’s room belongs to Ororo, and the nursery belongs to David. Nothing shocking there.

Alex holds his breath as they get to the master bedroom.

“And this is where we sleep,” Charles says, watching Alex very closely. “Erik and I.”

And there it is. 

Even after everything downstairs leading up to this, Alex is somehow still fucking shocked to hear it said out loud and all calm like that. Because holy shit, these guys really are homos and they’re treating it like it’s not even a big deal.

Alex… doesn’t know how to feel about that. Like, do they just let gays foster kids now? Alex thinks he must have known that, but he’s never experienced it, and he’s had plenty of chances. He’s the kid who’s had ~~seven~~ eight placements in five years, after all. He doesn’t exactly think this placement is going to be any different than the others. This doesn’t change anything. Foster parents are foster parents – even if they’re queer – and you can’t trust any of them. These rich gay fucks might act nice now, but sooner or later (probably sooner) their true colors are going to come out. The only difference here is that the straw that breaks the camel’s back probably isn’t going to be about Alex slutting it up with another boy.

Well, that’s something. It’s not much, but it’s something.

“Are we going to have a problem, Alex?” Charles asks, still looking very seriously at him. He fingers brush against his temple like maybe his headache is back.

Alex thinks about it, then shrugs. “Whatever,” he says.

That’s a good enough answer, apparently, because Charles's seriousness melts away and his dazzling smile is back.

“Excellent,” he says, voice happy again, “Your room next, hmm?”

He leads the way back down the hall to the only room they haven’t gone into yet – the one Alex had thought for sure was a guest room earlier. But wait a second, this is _Alex’s_ room?

No freaking way is that true. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would Alex get his own room when there’s a perfectly good set of bunkbeds in the boy’s room? This can’t be right. It has to be a trick somehow or a mistake.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” Charles starts.

Alex looks sharply at him, a nervous clench in his stomach. It might be a figure of speech but.. what if it’s not? What if this guy really does know what Alex is thinking? Alex has never met a telepath, but he knows they’re out there, and if this guy is one, this placement is going to be over before it even starts. No way would anyone who knows the truth about Alex’s past let him stay in their house, let alone give him his own freaking room there.

But then Charles continues with, “I agree with you: it’s very plain. But don’t worry about that; we’ll go out tomorrow and pick up whatever you like to decorate it.”

Alex’s stomach unclenches a bit. Of course. It was just a figure of speech, after all. Alex was just being a paranoid idiot (nothing new there). Charles is definitely not a telepath, not if _that’s_ what he thinks Alex is thinking. 

Erik frowns and adds, “Whatever you like _within reason_.”

Charles smirks at him. “Why of course, darling. When am I not reasonable?”

And…okay. They’re totally flirting, making eyes at each other and everything. Weird. Super weird. This cannot be a thing that two grown men do with one another. Right? 

Luckily or unluckily, Alex doesn’t have time to dwell on it.

Charles turns back to Alex and says, “Erik tells me you didn’t bring much with you. Is that right, Alex?”

Almost without warning, Alex feels the hot anger of this afternoon sweep over him again. Fuck the Blandings, he thinks. But of course he can’t say that to these guys. That would just make everything worse. The number one rule of the system is that you don’t talk to your fosters about how shitty it is.

“You can collect your duffel bag from downstairs after this,” Erik tells him. “Anything you need but don’t have, we’ll supply. For tonight, there’s a spare toothbrush in the bathroom for you.”

Right, sure. Like it's just going to be as easy as that. He'll believe it when he sees it.

“Just the one bag?” Charles asks, and he seems to be talking to Erik more than to Alex, so Alex doesn’t bother to answer. He’s still pissed off and he doesn’t want to risk any backtalk that might come out of his mouth if he opens it.

“My,” Charles mutters, frowning. “In our day, they at least lent you a garbage bag when they sent you on your way. But we won’t linger on that. Let’s go back downstairs and we’ll go through the house rules.”

And oh. Oh great. House rules. How fun.

Still, as crappy as those are bound to be, Alex feel almost better to hear about them. He’s spent all evening trying to figure out what he needs to do and not do to keep himself out of trouble. He doesn’t think they’re going to completely lay it all out for him right now (the worst rules are the ones no one talks about) but it’ll give him a place to start, at least.

Erik and Charles’s rules go like this:

1\. “Come home after school and do homework then you can go out with your friends or play in the backyard or playroom” (which is all well and good but Alex doesn't actually have any friends).

2\. “Do you have a phone?”(And Alex does, but he’s not going to let these assholes take it, so he says no). “Well, we’ll have to fix that. We’ll get you one tomorrow and program our numbers into it in case of emergencies.” (“Absolutely no sexting or nude pictures,” Erik tells him seriously, and Alex chokes on air).

3\. “Keep your room tidy and pick up after yourself in the common areas.”

4\. “If you do go out, please keep your phone on you at all times. Curfew is at six so we can all eat dinner together.”

5\. “Lights out at 10, though you'll have the night light if you need one. We also ask you to keep the noise down after the baby goes to sleep at eight. He's gotten pretty good at sleeping through the night but we don't want to tempt fate.”

6\. “Oh and of course we ask you to be kind to the other children. No hitting or name calling. If you have a problem that can't be resolved with words, come to Erik or me and we'll lend our assistance.”

“What, that’s it?” Alex asks, words out of his mouth before he can remember how bad an idea it is. But he can’t help it. He’d been expecting, well… more than that. That’s easy stuff. Where are all the hard rules? When are they going to tell him he can’t go into the kitchen when no one is supervising, or that he can’t lock his bedroom door at night? When are they going to tell him that he isn’t to lay a finger on any of their stuff and that he’s only got one shot at this so he’d better get his act together?

“That’s it,” Erik says. To Charles, he adds, “The children are back. Loitering outside.”

“Yes,” Charles agrees. “I can hear them. Very well, let’s wrap this up. Alex?”

Alex look at him.

“Yeah?” he asks. He doesn’t know what’s coming and he’s suddenly too fucking exhausted to even be nervous or angry anymore.

“Welcome to the family.”

Alex’s eyes start to water again, and for the life of him he doesn’t know why. It’s not like this means anything. It’s not like this placement is going to last. These people are definitely not as nice as they’re pretending to be. Sooner or later, Alex is going to learn their secrets, and when he does, it’s all going to go up in flames.

_Please_ , Alex thinks, _please don’t let those flames be from me._


	3. Chapter 3

Alex’s first night at his new placement strengthens his belief that no one can be as nice as Charles and Erik are pretending to be. For one thing, the sheets on the bed in his room (and holy fuck, he has his own room, that cannot be right) are real sheets and not one of the plastic kind that most foster places give you at first. And okay, maybe rich people can afford to replace the mattress if you end up being a bedwetter, but why would they bother when the plastic sheet shtick is so much easier to deal with? 

Even apart from that, though, this whole Mayberry setup is way too good to be true. The bathroom has five different kinds of bath soap. Five! Alex knows this because he has to dig through fucking all of them (plus extra razors, hair gel, princess barrettes, and a random pregnancy test for some reason) to find the spare toothbrush. That means that each of these people likes a different kind of bath soap and the fosters give enough fucks to buy them all. What kind of crazy is that?

But okay, fine. Alex will accept that these people have money and are willing to spend it. Maybe that’s just how rich people are. But that doesn’t mean the other shoe isn’t waiting to drop. There’s got to be a catch somewhere, and Alex isn’t going to let himself relax until he figures out what it is.

That’s probably why he doesn’t sleep well. Well, and because the fucking cramps are back. Alex doesn’t know what’s going on with his body or why it’s turned against him like this, but it’s fucking unbearable. 

He wakes up his first morning at the new placement nauseous to the point of actual pain. He makes it to the bathroom before he pukes, at least, but he knows even as he’s hanging his head over the toilet bowl (and pressing his flushed cheek against the cold metal of the seat, and yeah, gross, he’ll regret this later) that the others can definitely hear him and probably there’s going to be trouble.

His hypothesis is confirmed when, after maybe twenty minutes, he manages to drag himself back out into the hallway and finds Charles waiting for him.

“Are you alright, Alex?” he asks quietly.

Alex is very fucking not alright, and he’s too tired to pretend he is. He has never been this sick in his entire life. He’s clearly dying and he just wishes death would hurry it up already.

“It’s okay,” Charles says after a moment. “Go back to bed. I’ll go and find something that might help.”

A gun hopefully. Or fucking cyanide.

“Nothing so drastic as that,” Charles says. “Go on, then. Back to bed.”

Alex goes. He’s probably fucking up this placement even more than he already has done, but at this point, he just doesn’t care.

XXXXX

When Alex wakes up again, the alarm clock on the nightstand tells him it’s nearly noon. Which is… not great. On the other hand, some kind soul has left him a glass of water and – even knowing that it might come back up later – Alex’s mouth is dry enough that he’s willing to risk drinking it. The same someone has also left him a bowl full of hard candy, for some reason. Candy on an empty stomach doesn’t seem like a good idea to Alex, but he’s feeling shitty enough to give it a try.

With shaky hands, he picks one up and unwraps it. Red, and maybe that means something deep and important but Alex is too tired to figure it out. He just pops it into his mouth. The flavor is kinda weird, but not gross. And the funny thing is, it does seem to help a bit. It’s not instant, but after a few minutes he realizes his stomach is less fluttery than it had been when he first woke up.

He thinks he might have heard something once about how lollipops and peppermints help with car sickness. Well, Alex isn’t in a car, but he’s definitely got the sickness part of the equation. He wonders idly who left these things on his nightstand and how they knew it would help. Alex hadn’t seen anyone yesterday looking particularly green, but it’s possible he was too preoccupied with everything else going on to notice. Maybe one of these people has a bad stomach or something. Then again, maybe they just have a ton of supplies for all sort of things they’ll never really need. Look at all that stuff he’d found in the bathroom cupboard last night!

Alex realizes he’s feeling better suddenly and decides he’d better get up and get dressed. He’s going to need a shower first, though. He thinks the hot water might help with the dehydration. Osmosis or whatever. That’s how it works, right?

No one seems to be upstairs at all when Alex sneaks across the hall, which is good. He isn’t feeling up to dealing with anyone’s crap right now. The bathroom is as fancy as he remembers it from last night, and the towels are the fluffiest motherfuckers he’s ever seen. It’s almost ridiculous how big and soft these things are. He brings one corner of it to his face and just enjoys the comfort. Then he has to pull back right away, because if he lets himself, he’s going to curl up in one of these towels and fall right the fuck back to sleep.

As tired as Alex is, he knows he can’t afford to sleep any more of the day away. He’s already bound to be in enough trouble as it is. The only saving grace he can see is that it’s Saturday, so he’s not missing school for this. Not that Alex gives a fuck about school. Not that he’s even going to be in the same school as he was with the Blandings. But skipping school means Moira gets called and when Moira gets called, things tend to not go in Alex’s favor. Probably that’s the kind of thing Erik and Charles are really strict about, too. They are college professors, after all.

Maybe that’s their secret. Maybe they’re just crazy strict and hiding it well. That wouldn’t be so bad, actually. Alex has been in strict placements before – not just with the Blandings, though of course they’d been picked out specifically because of how strict they were. There had been at least two placements even before that where Alex’s life had been rigorously scheduled. It hadn’t exactly been fun, but at least he knew where he stood in places like that. When he’d messed up badly enough to be sent away, it had always been his own choice. He hadn’t just accidently broken rules he didn’t know about, which is definitely what’s going to happen here unless Alex is really fucking careful. It would be easier all around if Charles and Erik just told him what he was supposed to do.

Alex sighs and starts the water. Well, whatever terrible thing these people have hidden, whatever rule they’ve got that they don’t want to tell him, it’s bound to come out sooner or later. Until then, Alex will just have to bide his time.

Alex doesn’t have his own soap, so he pokes around the ones in the bathroom. He’s a bit nervous to smell any of them (soap, like perfume and laundry detergent, has been giving him trouble lately), but none of it is overpowering and thankfully none of it smells like flowers. He chooses the unscented sensitive skin body wash and tells himself it’s not stealing if they’ve told him he can help himself. Which they did. They definitely told him that.

He doesn’t want to get out of the shower even after he’s scrubbed clean, but he doesn’t want anyone accusing him of wasting water, either. The fluffy towel makes up for a lot, though, and he takes it with him as he sneaks back across the hall to his room. He doesn’t exactly have clean clothes to put on, but he can at least change his underwear and socks. 

He’s not really ready to face the day after that, but it’s not like he’s got a choice in the matter. Trouble is inevitable in this placement, he’s convinced, but he doesn’t want it to be because he’s lazy and stays in his room all day. 

By the time he stumbles downstairs, the lighting tells him it’s definitively afternoon. He hopes to be able to sneak into the kitchen and find something easy to eat without anyone noticing, but his plans are foiled almost at once by the sight of Erik sitting on the couch with a book in his lap. The baby, Alex notices, is sitting on the floor by Erik’s feet, hands reaching up toward three shiny balls which are… floating in the middle of the freaking air above his head.

“Whoa,” Alex says, eyeing the kid and the balls. “Is he… how is he doing that?”

Erik looks up at him, mouth curling up into what must be his favorite smile. 

“Doing what?” he asks.

Alex looks at him, then at the floating balls, then makes a flapping gesture with his hands, because _hello_ , it should be pretty obvious what he’s talking about here. Then he realizes Erik’s smirking at him. The bastard.

“Oh, that,” Erik says. “Well, it’s simple really. He’s not doing anything at all.”

He casually lifts a hand and waves it. The balls set themselves spinning in circles, much to the baby’s squealing delight.

“Oh,” Alex says, as it clicks into place. The baby isn’t the one making the balls move. Erik’s the one doing it. And that means… is Erik a mutant, too?

What are the freaking odds of that? Not only gay, but also a freaking mutant? No, just no. Alex refuses to believe it. This has got to be some kind of trick to lure him in. It’s like someone freaking read his mind and made up Alex’s perfect family. Gay like him, mutant like him, so nice it’s fucking unbelievable.

Actually, that’s exactly what it is. This whole thing is _unbelievable_. Alex genuinely does not believe it. Whatever terrible thing these people are hiding, it had better hurry up and come to the surface, because no one is this perfect and Alex is not going to put up with this bullshit for long.

“Well then, Alex. I’ve shown you what I can do. I believe it’s your turn.”

Alex swallows and takes an involuntary step back, heart suddenly pounding. Does Erik mean… is he asking about Alex’s mutation? But no, he can’t be. That doesn’t make any sense. They can’t know the truth about Alex or they wouldn’t have taken him in. This has to be some kind of test. Maybe Erik has a hunch and wants to prove it. Maybe it’s like the mutant version of gaydar.

This is a test. It has to be, and Alex doesn’t know how to pass it. He can’t show Erik his powers or admit what they are, because the second he shows Erik he’s right about Alex and that Alex is dangerous, there’s going to be hell to pay. He’s going to have to play dumb and hope for the best.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. He makes himself look right into Erik’s eyes, daring him to call him out on it but praying that he won’t.

They stare at each other for a long minute, Alex’s heart pounding loudly in his ears the whole time. He doesn’t look away, though, because he can’t show weakness here. He can’t let Erik know he’s lying. If he doesn’t want this to all be over right this second, he’s got to stand his ground.

Then at last, Erik blinks. He shrugs, and says, “If you say so. There’s toast or crackers in the kitchen, and the children are downstairs.”

Then he goes back to his book, and Alex bolts.

In the kitchen, he takes a moment to lean against the wall and catch his breath. His head is spinning. He still doesn’t quite believe that Erik is a mutant, too. And he’s clearly not shy about it if he’s using his power out in the open like that. Then again, with a power like telekinesis, what is there to hide? It’s not like Erik’s dangerous (well, not for that reason, anyway). Not like Alex.

But the question is, did Alex convince him just now? How did he even guess what Alex is? Moira tell them? Surely not. Surely she wouldn’t have done that to him, put him in that position. She wanted to get him a good place and that would be off the table entirely if she went around telling people what Alex did two placements ago.

It had to have been a guess. If Erik had any proof, any solid idea of what Alex is capable of, he wouldn’t have just let it go like that. He would have called Moira and had Alex out of his house within the hour. It had to have only been a guess. A test, and Alex has passed. Now he just has to keep it up.

Even if Erik is a mutant, it changes nothing. Alex is still a danger to the world, and he’s still a kid who’s had ~~seven~~ eight placements in five years. He’s going to have to do what he’s always done: keep a low profile and keep his powers hidden. There’s no other choice.

Alex’s head is starting to pound lightly, so he pushes himself away from the wall. He’ll think better once he’s got something in his stomach.

There is, indeed, toast in the kitchen. Well, it’s technically bread still, but the toaster is right there on the counter and Alex knows how to apply one to the other. He considers living dangerously and adding butter to the toast (and alright, maybe it’s kind of a fuck you to Erik after everything that just happened in the living room) but in the end he decides it’s probably better not to risk it. His stomach is remarkably more settled after the candy upstairs, but he doesn’t want to overdo it his first time out the gate.

Alex takes his plain toast downstairs with him. He doesn’t technically know if he’s allowed to have food outside the kitchen, but he’s already living dangerously, and anyway, neither Erik or Charles is going to see him doing it. If one of the kids happens to tattle on him later, all the better, because then at least Alex will be able to figure out there’s a snitch in the house.

Sean, predictably, is back at his video game when Alex gets downstairs, while Ororo is preoccupied with building a massive Lego tower. Neither of them look up at Alex, even when he takes another crunching bite of toast. Well… Alex could get used to that.

XXXXX

An hour or so later, just when Alex thinks he might at some point consider feeling human again, there’s movement on the stairs. Alex looks up to see Charles standing in the doorway. The baby is sitting against his hip and chewing on the shoulder of his sweater.

“Hello loves,” Charles says to the room at large. “Alex – feeling a bit better?”

“Hello, Papa,” Ororo says, but she doesn’t look up. Neither does Sean, who just grunts and says, “Prof.”

Alex wonders about that, about why Ororo calls the guy _Papa_ but Sean doesn’t. He’s never been in a house before where the parents required you to call them _Mom and Dad_ , and the fact that Ororo is the only one doing it makes Alex think it must be voluntary. Which is strange. Then again, maybe she’s been here a while. Everyone knows that the younger you are, the more fosters like you.

Alex realizes suddenly that Charles is watching him, and that he’s the only one who hasn’t answered.

“Um, morning,” he says, then feels stupid because of course it’s not morning. Now he just looks like an idiot.

Charles smiles, obviously not noticing Alex’s blush.

“You are feeling better, then?” he asks again.

“Yeah,” Alex says, and he leaves it at that.

“Excellent! Are you up to a bit of shopping?”

Alex looks at the other kids, but neither one of them is really paying attention. Which means Charles is talking to Alex. _Just_ to Alex.

This cannot end well.

XXXXX

Turns out there’s a shopping center a few miles down the road. Charles drives them there with the baby in the backseat. Alex spends most of the drive turned around in his seat watching the kid. He’s cute, Alex will give him that: all soft skin and brown-red hair. Alex kind of wants to hold him, but he doesn’t want to ask. Maybe when (if) he’s been with this family a while, he’ll try for it. Until then, he’s going to hold back.

Doesn’t mean he can’t watch, though. He keeps a close eye on the kid when Charles gets him out of his car seat and puts him into the stroller. The baby gives Charles a sort of betrayed look about being set down, but Charles just ruffles his (very soft-looking) hair and straps him in anyway.

Charles must catch Alex looking, because later on when they’re picking out curtains and sheets for Alex’s new bedroom (new bedroom! He’s still not over it!), he says, “Do you like kids, Alex?”

Alex decides to play it cool. He shrugs. “They’re okay. Kinda noisy. Smell funny.”

Charles laughs. “You’re not mistaken there,” he says. “But they can be very sweet, if you let them. It took David quite a while to get used to us, and for us to get used to him. But we know each other now, and I wouldn’t trade him for a thing. Of course that doesn’t make it easy. But he’s family, and family is worth everything. Wouldn’t you say?”

Alex doesn’t remember his family, not really. He had a mom and dad once, he knows that, but it’s been years since he’s seen them. If it weren’t for their pictures, he might not even remember what they looked like. He loves them, of course he does, but at this point, he doesn’t know what that’s worth to anyone.

But he can’t say that to Charles. He nods and keeps his mouth shut.

Shopping with Charles is easy, it turns out, mostly because Charles himself is easy. He does all the talking, for one thing, and he doesn’t mind when Alex doesn’t have much to say back. Probably that’s a habit Charles had to develop from living with Erik, and Alex thinks the implied comparison there should bother him more than it actually does. Around Charles, though, it’s hard to get worked up about abstract things like that. It’s far, far easier to worry directly about the things that Charles is buying for him.

_Within reason_ , Erik had said, but so far Alex isn’t seeing a whole lot of reasonableness. They get new bedsheets and blankets (even though Alex’s were perfectly fine last night), yet more bath soap (even though Alex swore the sensitive skin kind already at the house was fine by him), and some school supplies (which does actually make sense and Alex is fine with). They also buy clothes, which is sort of a troubling process in which Charles lets Alex wander around one of the fancy stores and tells him to “pick whatever you want.”

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Alex knows what he likes but he doesn’t know what Charles wants him to like, and that second opinion is much more important. Charles and Erik seem to wear a lot of sweaters (Charles in various colors while Erik seems to prefer black), but Alex doesn’t think those would suit him. Maybe Sean and Ororo would prove better examples. Both of them had been dressed sort of upscale but nothing absurd or uncomfortable. Looking at the clothes around him, Alex thinks he’s not going to have much of a choice about dressing upscale anyway. 

Might as well wing it, he figures. Not like it’s going to matter in the long run anyway. After everything that happened today, Alex is completely sure he won’t even last a week in this house before they’re ready to get rid of him. They’re going to have to call Moira in special before her visit next week, and she’s definitely going to be pissed about that.

But at least Alex will look classy as she’s yelling at him. Sometimes it really is the little things in life.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so: Todd Blanding. An FYI in case anyone isn't familiar with comic-lore (I myself was always more into the animated show). 
> 
> This random couple, the Blandings, had a son named Todd who died in a car crash, after which they adopted Alex and tried to make him into Todd 2.0. Which is... kinda creepy. In this AU, everyone lives but Alex got sent to live with them anyway. Todd isn't an important enough character for me to have tagged because he doesn't show up any time in the rest of the fic. In fact, I have an idea that Alex won't see him again for about five years, and even then it's only in passing. Todd doesn't recognize him and Alex thinks, dodged a bullet there!
> 
> Also, I have to go do boring work stuff, so here, have another quick chapter. I know I said two a week but we all know I can't stick to a schedule (that's my whole problem).

Erik works fast, that much Alex can admit. He might be a quiet asshole and a secret mutant, but he’s also fucking efficient. Alex had sort of expected to have a shit-ton of wait time Monday morning (he’d have cut them some slack; he only showed up Friday evening), but the school ends up being totally ready for him. All Erik has to do is sign some papers when he drops them off, and then Alex’s schedule and handbook are in his hands.

It’s not exactly something Alex is excited about, starting at a new school. At least it’s only October, so Alex won’t have that much catching up to do in his classes. He doesn’t have any illusions about that same thing being applied to making friends, but that’s fine; Alex prefers to be alone, anyway.

The weird thing, he notices right away, is how swanky this school is. Probably shouldn’t be such a surprise considering how ritzy the surrounding neighborhoods are, but it’s still a little disconcerting. There are no uniforms here, which means everyone is in their own clothes, and they’re all crazy swanky, too. Alex doesn’t feel so left out now that he’s got his own fancy clothes (not that they’re really his – he’s not going to get attached to stupid things like that this time around). No one talks to him all morning except the teachers and the office guy who shows him around, but at least no one shuns him, either.

So Alex spends the morning in the backs of classes, not really paying attention to the lessons. He’s got other things on his mind and probably he’ll be in a different school this time next week. No point in getting invested in anything here.

By the time lunch rolls around, Alex is pretty bored. The novelty of a new situation has worn off and by now he’s just hungry and faintly nauseous. He doesn’t actually have any money to buy lunch – Erik hadn’t given him any and Alex hadn’t dared ask about it. He does have some pieces of candy from his nightstand in his backpack, though, so he finds an empty table and starts to dig them out.

He startles when someone sets their tray down right next to him, but when he looks up he’s relieved to find it’s only Sean. He doesn’t quite trust Sean, but sometimes it’s just nice to find someone you know in a room full of strangers.

Also, where the fuck did Sean get lunch money? Did Alex somehow miss Erik slipping him some? Or did Sean scrounge his own money from somewhere? 

“Hey,” Sean says, sliding into the seat and grabbing up his sandwich. Turkey, it looks like. Alex’s stomach rumbles. “How come you’re not eating? Still sick?”

“I’m not sick,” Alex snaps.

Sean probably doesn’t believe that (Alex wouldn’t), but he just shrugs. “You forget your student ID number, then? I had to write mine on my hand every day when I first started here because the check-out lady wouldn’t let me through without it.”

Alex isn’t stupid. It doesn’t take him long to put that together. 

“Wait a sec,” he says, grabbing Sean’s arm. “Are you telling me you don’t use cash to buy lunch here? It’s all linked back to your ID number?”

Sean doesn’t look offended about Alex grabbing him. He nods easily.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “Erik fills it up for us. Like $150 every month.”

That, Alex thinks, would have been good fucking information to have when they showed him around. What the fuck, office guy? Where were you on that one?

“I’ll be back,” Alex says, and he goes to stand in the lunch line. 

Even after talking to Sean, Alex isn’t 100% convinced this whole money thing is real. When he was with the Blandings, he had a voucher for free lunches because he’s a foster. That would have been fine here, too, if they’d actually given him anything like that. But for Erik to give three different kids $150 every single month just to buy lunch… that’s like $4000 a year!

Rich people, man.

Alex finds himself a sandwich, a cup of peaches, a bag of chips, and a drink, then tries his luck at the register. He holds his breath the entire time the lady there is looking up his number (which he, unlike Sean, does not need to write on his hand). There’s a rough moment where the system is processing when Alex is completely convinced he’s going to be made a fool of and have to put everything back.

But then it works. Somehow, amazingly, it works, and the lady waves him on.

Well fuck. Looks like Sean was telling the truth, after all. 

“Not bad, this place,” Alex says when he gets back to their table (still empty except for them, thankfully).

He grabs his sandwich and, feeling sort of at peace with the world, jostles Sean’s shoulder with his own.

This kid’s not too bad, he thinks. Kind of a goofball and the way he’s eating his chips is disgraceful, but Alex could do worse for a temporary foster brother. Sean hasn’t steered him wrong yet, after all. He could have fucked Alex over a ton of times already, but he hasn’t. That isn’t something Alex is going to forget any time soon.

“So,” he says, “How long you been in this placement?”

“About a year,” Sean tells him.

“You notice anything… weird about them?”

Sean laughs. “You mean the gay thing, right? Yeah, that was kind of weird at first. But you get used to it. I used to think gays were more, you know, girly and stuff, but they’re not.”

That wasn’t quite what Alex meant, but Sean does have a point. Alex knew, obviously, that gays aren’t all girly (he’s definitely not, that’s for sure), but on the other hand, he definitely would not have thought either Charles or Erik were like that if they hadn’t freaking spelled it out for him.

Alex says, “They seem… nice.”

He doesn’t really mean that in a good way, but Sean nods anyhow.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’re totally nice. Well, sometimes they’re not, but at least they’re never mean.”

Alex frowns. Sean hasn’t led him astray yet but… he’s not quite ready to believe him on this. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

XXXXX

After school, Alex, Sean, and Ororo catch the bus back to the house. Alex lets the other two lead him down to the playroom where instead of getting out the game console or any kind of toys, they start in on their homework. Lame, but Alex remembers the rules from Friday night: homework first, then games. What else can you expect from a pair of professors, though, really?

Alex autopilots through his own homework. It’s nothing very exciting, just like classes today weren’t. Try as he might (although, okay, he hasn’t actually even done _that_ in a few years now), there’s just nothing about math or reading that makes him want to get involved. Science is pretty okay – Alex has always liked learning about plate tectonics and volcanos and stuff – but that’s only one subject out of a ton, and even in that class they still have to cover all about animals and plants and other things Alex likes but isn’t particularly invested in.

After homework, Sean pulls out his game again, but this time he side-eyes Alex and says, “Hey, you wanna play?”

Alex doesn’t actually have much experience with video games (just never had the chance), but he agrees. Sean shows him the ropes, and also casually mentions that Charles and Erik bought him this game specifically for his birthday.

“They’re great about that,” Sean tells him. “They always remember holidays and birthdays and stuff. And money for lunch at school. They never forget that, either.”

He says it casually, like he doesn’t care either way, but Alex thinks wherever Sean was before this, they must not have been great about that kind of thing.

Still, just because Charles and Erik are good about presents doesn’t mean they’re actually perfect, right?. That just doesn’t make sense. How could Alex of all people scored perfect foster parents? Even if those parents exist – the good ones who treat you just like you’re their own damn kid – why would they ever have picked Alex of all people?

There’s got to be some mistake here.

Not long after that, Charles comes home, and Erik calls them for dinner. Charles, Sean explains as they clean up downstairs, works late on Mondays and Fridays, while Erik works late on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They stagger their classes like that so that someone will always be home when the kids get back from school. Yesterday, Alex probably would have taken that as a sign that Charles and Erik don’t trust them alone in their house. Today, he’s… less sure about all that.

Dinner is rough. Alex’s stomach is upset again, and it could be his usual persistent nausea, but it also might just be his confusion about this place bleeding through to his digestive system. He tries to eat anyway, but of course that doesn’t fly in this house.

“You’re not feeling well again?” Charles asks.

“Long day,” Alex tells him, and he’s almost insanely proud of himself for the lie, especially when no one calls him on it.

“If there’s something you’d rather eat, you just have to say,” Erik says.

Like everything else that’s happened today, Alex doesn’t know what to make of this. Is he serious, or is this a trick?

Alex just can’t take the chance.

“I’m fine,” he says.

After dinner is cleaned up, Alex trails along after everyone else into the living room where they set up camp Leave it to Beaver style. Ororo grabs a book from the shelf in the corner and curls up with it on Erik’s lap on the couch. The baby stands on shaky legs at their feet making grabby hands until Ororo bends down and hoists him up to look at the pages, too. Sean, meanwhile, has grabbed one of his schoolbooks from downstairs and is asking Charles for help with his math problems. 

It’s all very fucking domestic, and Alex… well, he more or less just stands there awkwardly, watching them. Then Ororo (who Alex definitely thought hated him) looks up and says,  
“You can sit by us, you know. Or you could start your award board.”

Award board?

She points to the wall behind Alex and he turns to see the cork boards he’d noticed that first day – the ones with graded tests and macaroni art and things. One of them has Sean’s name at the top. The other has Ororo’s. The third is completely blank, like it’s waiting for something… waiting for Alex.

Looking at the empty board, something suddenly snaps inside Alex. He suddenly can’t breathe, can’t even think. He stumbles back away from the board, then turns and bolts. He doesn’t know where he’s going, just that he can’t be in that room with these people anymore – not when they’re all so fucking perfect and Alex can never be part of it. 

So fuck this. He’s out.

He ducks into the kitchen, then sees the backdoor and makes for it. He steps into their stupidly perfect backyard and he hates that, too. He does a circle of the fenced-in yard, then another, then sits down on the porch steps and puts his head in his hands.

He’s just… so fucking confused right now. Who are these people? Are they really the perfect fosters like they seem to be? Sean and Ororo obviously think so, and they would know, right? But how could that be the truth? How could they be so perfect and still want _Alex_? Don’t they know what he’s done? Don’t they know that he’s had _seven placements in five years_?

“You know,” Charles says from right behind Alex, “we’d like to help you, Alex.”

Alex startles around, almost falling off his step as his heart tries to beat out of his chest. 

“Holy shit!” he says, and then facepalms because what the fuck mouth-to-brain filter?

But Charles doesn’t say anything about the language. He just eases himself down by Alex’s side so they can both stare out into the darkening sky.

They sit in silence for a moment. Alex realizes he’s trembling and tucks his hands into his pockets.

Eventually, Charles says, “There’s nothing wrong with needing time to adjust to a new situation. We’re not trying to deceive you in any way. We only want to help you. All we ask is that you trust us.”

But how can Alex trust them when he barely knows them, especially when it’s never worked out before?

“We understand it won’t be immediate or easy,” Charles says. “But we’d like for you to get to know us before you decide we’re not worth the effort. Do you think that’s something you could try?”

And how the fuck did Charles know what Alex was thinking just then? Next he’s going to say he really is a fucking telepath.

_As a matter of fact, I am_ , Charles says, but his mouth doesn’t move when he says it. Somehow, the words just come into Alex’s mind. 

Alex jerks back, shocked. “What the fuck?” he says. He can feel his mouth hanging open, his eyes going wide. But seriously: what the actual fuck?

“I suppose Moira didn’t tell you,” Charles says, and he’s smiling again, probably really fucking pleased with himself about giving Alex the shock of his life.

“That you can read fucking minds?” Alex asks. “No. No she definitely did not mention that bit.”

“Ah, well. She must have had her reasons. But it’s not a secret in this house. We’re special, all of us. We’re gifted, Alex. And you are, too.”

A gift, Alex thinks. His powers of destruction, a _gift_? No, absolutely not. What Alex can do isn’t a gift, it’s a hazard.

In that moment, Alex knows the truth at last: these people really are perfect. They’re perfect, there’s no denying it now. It’s almost the worst secret they could have. The worst for Alex, anyway, because just as soon as these people find out how much of a disaster Alex really is, they’re going to send him away for sure.

And if Alex can’t stay here with this perfect family, there’s no reason in drawing the torture out any longer than he has to.


	5. Chapter 5

Alex starts planning right away. Since Charles and Erik aren’t going to keep Alex once they really know how much of a disaster he is, there’s no point in dragging out his stay here. It’s better for everyone if he gets out as soon as he can. He’s just got to make everyone understand as soon as possible that he’s a hopeless case.

Luckily, Alex has a knack for trouble, so it shouldn’t be too hard to dig some up. He’s even got a time table. Moira, when she’d left him here, said she’d be back in one week, which gives Alex another four days to work with. He doesn’t want them to call her out sooner than that and risk her talking them into keeping him, so he’s going to have to start out small and save the big boom (no pun intended, obviously) for the day she’s due to arrive.

Four days, and between now and then he’s got to make everyone in this house hate him.

Alex’s first plan of action is to analyze all the reasons he’s been kicked out of placements before. The most recent example, of course, would be sleeping with Todd Blanding, but Alex isn’t convinced that would work here. For one thing, he already knows Charles and Erik aren’t opposed to people being gay on principle, and even if they were a bit uneasy about two of their foster kids going at it, he doubts it would be a deal-breaker. Besides, Alex isn’t all that sure he could even go there with Sean. Sean’s nice enough, obviously trustworthy, and not bad looking, but he doesn’t ring Alex’s bell the way Todd Blanding had.

So obviously seduction is out of the running. But there are still plenty of other things Alex has done to fuck up a placement. Stealing, he knows, is a good one, and so is being messy and lazy. Those definitely seem like things Alex could do in this situation. And then, once he’s been a nuisance that way, he’ll bring out the big guns, all just in time for Moira to come back.

XXXXX

When Alex comes home the next day from school, he kicks his shoes off in the middle of the living room and leaves them there before following the others downstairs for homework. Except Alex definitely isn’t doing his homework today. No, he’s going to take a nap instead.

“Don’t you have homework, Alex?” Ororo asks in that serious, disapproving way she must have picked up from Erik.

“Nah,” Alex says. He finds a comfy spot on the couch and brings his hands up to rest behind his head. Yeah, a nap definitely sounds good about now.

XXXXX

During dinner, Charles asks, “How has school been going, Alex?”

“Piece of cake,” Alex tells him through a mouthful of potatoes. He’s decided to chew with his mouth open today, and from the looks Erik’s been giving him, it’s working wonders.  
He’ll be out of this joint in no time.

“The homework hasn’t been too awful?” Charles presses.

Alex narrows his eyes at Ororo, because she had to have snitched about what happened downstairs. She doesn’t look at him.

He tells Charles, “Nothing I can’t handle.”

Erik snorts but doesn’t say anything.

Charles hums thoughtfully.

“You know, I never really agreed with this overloading children with homework. Of course there are a limited number hours in the school day and some work is best done independently anyway, but there’s really only so much repetition one can take before it does more harm than good, particularly when the lesson being taught is incorrect to being with.”

He pauses to put more noodles onto the baby’s tray.

“There are, you know, a number of philosophies of teaching, and many of them come back to the idea-”

He’s cut off by Sean groaning loudly. “Come on, Professor, can’t you be less professor-y while we’re trying to eat?”

Charles looks mildly affronted, and Alex takes note. Is this how you make a nuisance of yourself in this house?

“Are you telling me you don’t appreciate a lecture with your pasta?” he asks. “What on earth is becoming of these young people? My darling,” he appeals to Erik,” do you hear how they speak to me?”

Erik doesn’t look up from his plate. “Yes, you’re very maligned,” he agrees. “Pass the rolls?”

XXXXX

Clearly Alex hadn’t been obvious enough in his rule-breaking. He needs to be bigger about it, louder. He decides to try again at breakfast. He usually starts the day with a piece of hard candy to settle his stomach then moves on to cereal if he thinks he can keep it down. Today he’s feeling a bit better than usual, so he gets himself downstairs and to the table along with everyone else.

An idea forms in his head as he munches on corn flakes. He’s got a stoneware bowl, a glass cup, and a mostly-full gallon of milk right in front of him. Best of all, everyone is right there to watch him make a mess of things. This is it. He’s not going to get a better opportunity than this to prove how much trouble he is. Carefully, steadily, he brings one arm up and swipes everything within reach onto the floor.

The crash is horrendous. The glass shatters, the bowl cracks. There’s milk and cereal everywhere. Alex watches it spread, torn between instinctual fear and the certainty that this is what needs to be done. He swallows and looks up at the others.

Everyone’s watching him, of course. Ororo has her hand over her mouth, Sean is gaping at him with his wet eyes wide, and even Charles looks shocked. Erik, at least, doesn’t look surprised at all, though maybe he’s just hard to get a reaction out of. He looks at Alex with narrowed eyes, then slowly turns his head to look at Charles.

“Thank you, Alex,” Charles says quietly. “That will do. Please fetch a towel from the laundry and get this cleaned up. Sean, would you be so kind as to find the broom?”

Sean pushes back his chair and goes to get the broom, but Alex just sits there, confused.

What, that’s it? Just clean it up? No yelling, no screaming? No punishments?

Well what the fuck?

“Alex,” Charles says, “I won’t ask you again.”

As much as Alex really wants to disobey, there’s something in that voice that scares him. It’s not that he thinks Charles is going to hurt him if he doesn’t obey. It’s something else, something Alex doesn’t understand and doesn’t really want to find out.

He gets up and goes to the laundry instead.

XXXXX

After all that, Sean looks at him kind of strange when they meet for lunch.

“So, uh, you okay man?” he asks.

“Yeah, fine,” Alex tells him. And he is. He doesn’t enjoy feeling like an asshole, but he has to keep remembering that this is all for a reason. A damn good reason.

“Uh huh,” Sean says, and his face says he thinks Alex is lying. “Look man, if you need to talk to someone or something, Charles and Erik won’t tell you no, you know?”

“I’m fine,” Alex tells him again.

“If you say so,” Sean says, and goes back to poking at his fruit cup.

“I do,” Alex says, and he keeps telling himself that even when he gets called out in front of everyone in two different classes for not having his homework done. It’s all for the best in the end.

XXXXX

That night, Alex leaves even more of a mess in the living room than yesterday: kicking off his shoes, throwing his jacket onto the couch, and knocking over the basket of spit-up rags just for the hell of it. He doesn’t follow Sean and Ororo downstairs, either, but decides that he’s going to skip homework again and do the thing he’s wanted to do for days now: he’s going to touch that baby and see if its skin is as soft as it looks.

It only takes him a few minutes to track the baby down to the office room. Unfortunately (but probably not surprisingly) Charles is there too. He looks up when Alex comes into the room.

“Afternoon, Alex,” he says, and he doesn’t sound mad at all about this morning (which means Alex definitely has to step up his game).

“Hi,” Alex says, not looking at him. He’s looking instead at the baby, who’s in one of those round exerciser seat things, pressing buttons that make music and hitting a rattle back and forth on its chain. It only takes a second for the baby to realize he’s being watched, and when he does, he jerks his little head up to look back at Alex. Then he raises his arms into grabby hands and Alex goes for it, picks him up and holds him close without asking.

The baby nuzzles into Alex’s chest, and Alex look up at Charles, daring him (pleading with him) to say something, to yell.

Instead, Charles smiles. 

Alex blinks, taken aback.

“Do you like children, Alex?” Charles asks.

“Uh,” Alex says, not sure what the fuck’s going on now. “I guess so. They’re okay.”

“They’re a lot of work, you know,” Charles continues. “But worth it, I think. No matter how much they fuss, no matter how often they throw their toys onto the ground just to annoy you, at the end of the day, they’re always worth it.”

Alex swallows. He suddenly thinks Charles isn’t just talking about the baby here, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

“He must cause you a lot of trouble,” he says at last.

Charles’s smile turns into a grin. “Oh yes,” he says ruefully. “Immense amounts. But he’s family, Alex, and you never turn your back on your family.”

That, at least, brings Alex back to his senses. It must be really fucking easy for Charles to say that about his own damn bio-kid. But Alex doesn’t have a family and he never will. He’s never going to be anyone’s family again, and he’s used to it by now.

He puts the baby back in its seat-thing, trying to ignore how it whines at him.

“I’ve got to go,” he tells Charles. “Homework, you know.”

Then he turns and leaves. But he doesn’t go downstairs and he doesn’t do his homework. Instead, he creeps silently upstairs and into the master bedroom, where he decides he’s going to have to pull out the big guns and do some stealing.

The master bedroom, where Alex has only spent a minimal amount of time before, is dark and smells kind of musty. Alex thinks that musty smell might actually be the smell of sex, which is kind of gross and kind of a turn-on in a way that Alex just doesn’t want to think about (but he’ll admit in the private shame of his own mind that Charles and Erik are both fucking hot, okay, and it wouldn’t be torture to see them going at it sometime). 

There don’t seem to be a lot of valuables laying around, either, which is kind of a shame. There’s a lockbox under the bed, but Alex (like Sean) does not know how to pick a lock, so he ignores that and searches the drawers instead. The dresser is almost exclusively clothes, though there is one drawer that has some tie-pins and cufflinks in it. Not a very good haul, but Alex takes them anyway, shoves his pockets full and hopes they’re valuable.

He does a bit better in the nightstands on either side of the bed. He takes a pair of glasses he sometimes sees Erik wear around the house. Those, at least, will be missed right away. He also swipes two bottles of vitamins – iron and folic acid, whatever that is. Neither of those finds is bound of be worth very much, but their loss will at least be irritating, which is really what Alex wants anyway. Not like he was ever going to black market this shit.

He does get sort of a shock when he opens one of the nightstand drawers. He doesn’t know what he expects to be in there, but it’s certainly not a huge shiny silver dildo.

“Whoa,” he breathes, not quite daring to touch it. It’s just… so big and so shiny! Alex will admit to liking pretty things (that is, after all, how he got involved with Todd Blanding), but this might be a bit too much for him. Not that it wouldn’t be cool to try out, but… he doesn’t know where this thing has been (or rather, he kind of does, and it’s weird for him). So he ends up leaving it where it is, but he does swipe the condoms and lube in the same drawer, just because he can.

And that’s pretty much it. Not a great haul, especially if Alex was actually intending to sell anything, but hopefully it’ll get his point across. There’s no way Charles and Erik will keep him once they find out he’s a thief. Fosters like their stuff more than they like their kids, and that’s something Alex’s learned the hard way over the years.

Surely this will do the trick.

XXXXX

Alex waits all evening for someone to say something about the missing stuff. Maybe, he thinks, he’ll get lucky and they’ll even do some yelling. It’ll be great, he thinks. Maybe there will even be tears.

But actually, that’s not what happens at all. No one says anything at all about the missing stuff until the next morning when Erik comes down to breakfast, more late than usual and with the baby under his arm. The baby is… dressed sort of oddly. Alex has only ever seen the kid in nice, classy, matching outfits. Today, though…

“Oh, dear,” Charles says quietly when he sees the kid.

Erik sniffs primly and puts the baby into the highchair, obviously choosing to take the highroad here and pretend nothing’s wrong.

Sean, on the other hand, bursts into laughter.

“He looks like Christmas!” he cheers.

The baby does, in fact, look kind of like Christmas. His shirt is bright red and his pants are neon green. And okay, babies can get away with that kind of thing, but this is not a good look for this kid, not with the way his hair is already sort of reddish and his skin is so pale.

“Daddy,” Ororo says carefully, (and Charles takes a deep, startled breath but doesn’t interrupt), “Have you lost your glasses again?”

Erik’s frown somehow becomes even deeper, and Alex thinks for the first time that he’s actually going to get in trouble about this.

But Erik just says, “They’re not lost. I know exactly where they are.”

Then he turns and goes to the fridge to get the cut fruit for the baby’s breakfast.

Charles watches him carefully, then turns to look straight at Alex. Alex holds his breath, hoping for something, anything.

But still… nothing. No one yells. No one accuses Alex of being a thief. No one says anything at all about where the missing stuff must have gone.

At this point, Alex honestly doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong.

XXXXX

Alex spends the school-day planning on how best to escalate the situation. He’s only got one day until Moira comes, after all, and since nothing else seems to be working with these people, Alex is going to have to use his secret, most dangerous weapon. He’ll have to be careful about it, though. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, and he doesn’t want to get arrested or anything (again). He just needs to make a big enough mess that Charles and Erik realize how dangerous he is and agree to get rid of him.

He thinks about it in class and he thinks about it at lunch and he thinks about it some more on the bus ride home. He’ll have to wait until dinner, he thinks, when for sure everyone will be clustered around the table. Then he’ll excuse himself to go to the bathroom and have an “accident” of the plasma-blast variety in the living room. No one will be in harm’s way and yet there will still be utter destruction. Charles and Erik will be rich enough to fix it all up, but they’ll definitely not keep Alex around after that.

It’s pretty much the perfect plan, and Alex is still going over the details of it when he comes into the house. That’s why he’s distracted enough that he doesn’t realize something’s happening until Sean yells, “Oh my God, Moira!” at the top of his lungs and dives headfirst over the couch and into her lap.

Ororo, who doesn’t seem nearly as impressed, just shakes her head and proceeds to put away her jacket and shoes as usual.

Alex… doesn’t know what to make of it. Does this mean his plan worked even without the big finale? He didn’t think he was making that big of an impact, but why else would Moira be here waiting for him a day early?

“Sean,” Charles says, voice exasperated but also somehow fond, “please try to contain yourself, won’t you?”

That’s when Alex realizes Moira isn’t alone. Both Charles and Erik are sitting with her, and they’ve apparently all been talking. Well… so far, so good.

“Oh, he’s fine,” Moira says, and she pets Sean’s hair in a way that she definitely has never done for Alex, even when he was sick that time at her office last week. Alex is… not  
jealous, exactly, but kind of peeved that Moira actually can be nice and she’s just been choosing not to use that niceness on Alex. Typical.

“You said I had a week,” he says, feeling sort of betrayed.

Moira looks up at him, eyebrow raised, and yep... that’s definitely the Moira Alex knows.

“Hello, Alex,” she says, and she smiles.

Alex doesn’t smile back. “You said you’d be back in a week,” he says again.

Moira’s smile falters. “No… I don’t think I said that.”

“Yes, you did,” he tells her. “You said one week.”

“Alex,” Moira says carefully, “I think there’s been a mistake. I’m fairly sure I said I’d be back next week. Which I am. Does it matter?”

Yes, Alex wants to say. Yes, it fucking matters. He feels like he’s been lied to. He’d based all his plans on Moira being back in one week exactly and the whole thing had been a fucking lie.

God, he’s such an idiot. He feels like… like he might cry or something. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

“Sean, Ororo,” Charles says slowly, “would you give us a moment?”

Sean whines about it (and somehow the hussy manages to extract a promise that Moira will for sure not leave without saying goodbye), but eventually he and Ororo go downstairs. Which just leaves Alex with Charles, Erik and Moira.

“Come sit down, Alex,” Moira says.

Alex doesn’t move.

“Sit,” Erik repeats, and Alex sits, because he’s not stupid enough to argue with that tone of voice, alright.

“Thank you,” Moira says, like he’s doing it for her and not because Erik’s command voice is fucking scary.

She goes on, “How have you been settling in? How’s the new school? Have you made any friends?”

Friends? Friends! Of course he hadn’t made any fucking friends! He’s a freak and he knows it. And fine, alright, there’s Sean, but he’s clearly an outlier, and anyway, it’s not going to matter because Alex isn’t staying here.

“No,” he snaps. “I haven’t. Can we go now?”

Moira’s eyebrow goes back up. “Go where?” she asks. 

“Somewhere else,” Alex says. He looks into her eyes and pleads with her to understand. “Anywhere else.” He steals himself, then adds, “Please.”

Moira sighs and shuts her eyes for a moment, eyebrow dropping back down where it belongs.

“Alex,” she says slowly, carefully, in a way that can mean nothing good for Alex’s chances of getting out of here. “Look, placements don’t grow on trees, alright? You know that. Charles and Erik told me it’s been going really well. Is that not true?”

Alex steals a glance at Charles, who’s smiling softly, and then at Erik, who’s got his poker face on. They’re both watching him carefully.

Alex swallows hard. “I…um…”

He can feel himself shaking, can feel the prickling in the back of his eyes that means he’s going to start crying. He doesn’t know what’s going on here and he doesn’t like it. Why would Charles and Erik lie for him like this? Why would they say it’s going well when Alex hasn’t been anything but a pain in the ass all week? He’s done all the things he can do except the worst one, and he’s broken their stupid rules, and still they’re not going to rat him out to Moira.

“Alex,” Charles says, and Alex looks over into his steady, kind eyes. “We want you to stay. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or what you might do. We want you to stay.”

It takes Alex a minute to process that, to remember and understand the fact that Charles is a fucking telepath and he can read Alex’s damn mind. Does he know what Alex has done, what Alex is capable of doing? Does he know how dangerous it is for Alex to be here with these other kids he might hurt? Does he know how much Alex really, really wants to stay?

“We want you here,” Erik agrees suddenly, and his still looks so serious, but he… something about his eyes makes Alex think he really means it. “We belong together, all of us. We’re meant to protect each other. You must know that.”

It’ll never work, Alex thinks desperately. If he stays here any longer he’s going to get attached and then when they decide to get rid of him – and they will – it’s going to break him. 

Charles clears his throat. “This might sound trite, but Alex, perhaps you should take a chance on us. That’s all we really ask. If we all try our best – and I do mean our _actual_ best, not what’s been passing for it this past week – there’s no reason to assume anything will end in disaster. All we want, Alex, is for you to feel part of something here.”

God, Alex thinks, and closes his eyes so they won’t know he’s starting to tear up. These people are really fucking perfect. And Alex… he just doesn’t deserve that. But he’d be an idiot to say no. He’d be an idiot to try to fuck this up. He should be begging them to stay, he knows it. He should be on his absolute best behavior for these guys.

“Alex?” Moira asks. “What do you think? Are you going to be okay here?”

Alex looks away from her and tries to wipe his eyes without her seeing. When he feels like he’s got himself under control, he looks back.

“Yeah,” he says, and he’s proud of how strong his voice comes out. “Yeah, I’m going to be fine.”

He’s going to be better than fine. He’s going to be so good Charles and Erik are going to want to keep him forever.


	6. Chapter 6

Of course, it’s not as easy as all that. Alex might say he’s going to be on his best behavior, but that doesn’t mean he’s automatically a perfect kid. He didn’t exactly start out on the best foot with these people, and he’s got kind of a deep hole to dig his way back out of before he can even try to act like a good kid would.

He starts by returning the stuff he stole. A big part of him wants to just put the stuff back while Charles and Erik are somewhere else. But that’s not what a good kid would do, and Alex knows his staying here is contingent on him pretending to be one of those.

That’s why he waits until that evening after everyone’s gone to bed before knocking on the master bedroom door. Well, first he listens outside for a while to make sure there aren’t any sex noises happening in there. But then he knocks.

There’s a scuffle and a murmur, and then Charles says, “Come in, Alex.”

And of course he would know who’s outside. He probably knew Alex was outside the whole time. Damn cheating telepaths.

Alex takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, then pushes the door open.

Charles and Erik are both in bed already. Neither of them are wearing shirts, and Alex has sort of disconnect, because while Erik is thin and muscled, Charles is a lot more round in the middle than Alex would have thought. He’s not… fat, exactly, but there’s definitely some roundness going on there.

Charles clears his throat and Alex drags his eyes up and away. He blushes, wondering how much Charles is able to read of his thoughts at any given time. Does he know what Alex was just thinking? Is he mad?

He doesn’t look mad, though, just sort of encouraging, so Alex takes a step forward and holds out his hands.

“I, uh, have some of your things,” he forces himself to say.

Erik frowns and immediately holds a hand out. Alex is confused for a moment, wondering what he’s supposed to do, but then he realizes that the glasses in his hands are lifting up on their own and floating easily over to Erik’s waiting palm. At the same time, the tie pins and cuff links also whiz back over to their drawer in the dresser, which opens by itself to let them in.

“Thank you, Alex,” he says calmly.

And okay, that’s fucking impressive. Telekinesis is way cool, Alex doesn’t care what anyone says.

“As for the other things,” Charles says, “they’re yours to keep.”

Alex stares at him, confused.

“Of course I advocate masturbation over sex with a partner until you’re ready for that step, but you’ve had a bit of experience, I can tell, and I don’t want you taking any risks should the opportunity arise.”

Alex chokes on thin air. 

“What?!”

Charles grins, and it’s a little bit evil, Alex can tell.

“Come now, Alex, sex is a perfectly natural part of life. An enjoyable one, even.”

And Alex definitely does not want to go into that. He’s not _that_ much of a good kid, not now and maybe not ever.

“What about the vitamins?” he asks, desperate to change the subject.

“Keep them,” Charles says simply. “Take one of each every day. They’ll be good for you.”

“Okay,” Alex says, confused but willing to roll with it. Vitamins are good, whatever. He’ll take it if it means getting out of this situation. “Right. I’m just going to go, then.”

He hooks a thumb over his shoulder and takes a step backward.

“Good night,” Charles says. “Oh, and Alex?”

Alex looks up at him, heart pounding.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s not have any more misses on homework, shall we?”

“Right,” Alex says. “Got it.”

And then he runs for it.

XXXXX

Thus begins Alex’s life as a good kid, the kind of kid Charles and Erik would want to keep. He was an idiot before for trying to ruin this, he realizes that now. It doesn’t make any fucking sense that he would deliberately try to wreck the best placement he’s ever had. Clearly it was just his illness going to his head.

So Alex spends the next few weeks on damage control. He can’t make up for what happened before, but luckily Charles and Erik don’t seem like the type of people to hold a few mistakes against him. He’s very careful to follow all their rules now, and if that means putting his things away and doing his homework right after school, it’s a small price to pay for not being uncomfortable in his own skin all the time the way he was in the last few placements before this one.

Not that Alex is _comfortable_ , exactly, not when he’s got to try so hard to be good all the time. But even with all that, he feels good here in a way he never has before. Of course there’s still his powers to think about, and his past, and how dangerous he might end up being to these people, but Alex will deal with that when it happens. If it happens. It might not, if Alex can keep himself in check.

His illness doesn’t help with that, of course. He’s still sick in the mornings and tired most of the day. He finds himself getting angry about irrational things, like there not being any chocolate milk left in the cafeteria at lunch. He doesn’t know what it’s about that’s about, and if it would just go away, he would be fine with never finding out.

The candy helps, at least, but the vitamins don’t. They leave a weird taste in his mouth and that’s definitely not a good thing when he’s already so nauseas all the time. It also doesn’t help that so many people at school wear strong-ass perfume. It’s probably to be expected with how fancy they all dress, but even the guys smell like they drench themselves in spray every morning before coming in. Needless to say, Alex finds himself becoming very familiar with the school bathrooms.

At least at home he doesn’t seem to have that problem. It’s the smell of flowers he has the most trouble with, and all the soap in the house is either fruity or unscented. Plus no one at all seems to wear any type of spray, which is a godsend. 

Alex says as much to Sean, who might be a space case but definitely has noticed Alex being sick all over the place.

“Oh,” Sean says, like he barely remembered that cologne was even a thing. “Oh yeah. I haven’t worn anything like that since David. Guess I kind of… forgot about it.”

Well, that’s vague as fuck, but probably Sean has more important things to focus on than body spray. Things like playing video games and impressing his caseworker with his cuteness. Stuff like that.

Anyway, it makes sense. Babies have sensitive skin probably, and you wouldn’t want to spray stuff when they’re brand new.

“How long’s David been around?” Alex asks, idly curious. “He’s a bio-kid, right?”

“Yeah,” Sean agrees. “He’s like a year.” He pauses, eyes rolling up and to the left as he obviously tries to count back the months. “Got here just after I did. He was tiny when he was just born, you know?”

Alex doesn’t, but he shrugs agreeably. What does he know about babies, anyway? Not fucking much, that’s what.

XXXXX

“So,” Alex asks a different day, “What’s with Erik dressing the baby like a Christmas tree?”

Sean snorts into his milk, then tries to school his face into something more serious. Then he laughs again.

“Oh man,” he says, wiping milk off his lip with the back of his hand. “It’s not funny, not really. But holy crap, that was a great outfit.”

It really was.

“Erik’s colorblind, you know,” Sean explains. “He used to dress himself like that all the time when I first got here. It was all reds and purples with him and I figured he just liked those colors. But then for Christmas the Professor bought him those glasses and apparently they’re supposed to let you see colors. So now he just wears black all the time and no one ever talks about it. He’s sensitive, you know?”

Alex could see that, maybe. Erik’s so upright and in charge all the time, so it isn’t any wonder that he would be sensitive about an impairment like that. He seems like he’d be the type to get mad rather than laugh off other people making fun of him. 

Well, he’s not alone there; Alex knows his pain.

XXXXX

For three weeks, things go really well. Alex is good and does his homework and doesn’t have any sort of outburst that might ruin everything. The good times can’t last forever, though, and as much as Alex tries, he’s never been a good kid, not really.

It starts off common enough, just him coming home from school one day in the third week after Moira’s visit, tired and kind of mad about something the stupid sun getting in his eyes. It gets worse from there, though, because his math homework that day is giving him trouble. Also his head hurts and Sean won’t stop fucking humming some stupid song they heard on the bus.

At last he throws down his pen.

“That’s it,” he says. “Fuck it. I’m going outside.”

And he does, but the sun is still bright and his cramps are awful today and his stupid chest aches for some reason. It’s all too much and Alex just wants it to stop. He can literally feel himself shaking as he stands there in the backyard, trying to reign himself in.

He knows it’s going to happen before it does, but only just barely and he can’t control it anyway. He feels the anger – the stupid irrational anger – building up and up and up and then finally just exploding out of him in waves. He closes his eyes against the heat of the blast (and okay, against the tears maybe).

He knows what he’s going to find when he opens his eyes. There’s a bench on the other side of the yard that they sometimes come out and sit on. Or rather, there was a bench. Not anymore. Now it’s just a wreck of sliced metal, still smoking from the heat of Alex’s power.

And it’s so fucking stupid! Why is this how it goes? Out of all the ways Alex could have really fucked something up, why like this? Nothing even was _wrong_ , he was just hot and tired and cranky, and now all that’s left are the charred remains of something that was nice.

This is what Alex does, he’s always known that. He fucks things up. He cannot have nice things. 

He can feel his breath hitching in his chest, because he knows what this means. Charles and Erik, they might have been okay with keeping him before, but this changes things, just like he knew it would. This changes _everything_. They can’t keep him, not when he’s just proved he’s dangerous.

He has to get out of here, he thinks, looking around wildly at the yard. No one’s come out yet to see what the raucous is about, but it’s only a matter of time. And if Moira gets called out, who knows what’s going to happen to Alex?

Placements don’t grow on trees, she’s always telling him that, and this is just one more reason for no one else to want him. He’s on his own.

Alex does the only thing he can do: he runs for it.

XXXXX

Alex only makes it half a block from the house before he has to sit down on someone’s front stoop. His legs are just too shaky to carry him and his breath is still coming in ragged gasps. He can’t stay still too long, he knows that, but he needs a freaking minute, alright?

As he’s sitting there, staring off into space and thinking about where to go next, a blonde lady with a kid on her hip pokes her head out a door and does a quick scan of the street. When she sees Alex, her face does something funny, like she’s surprised maybe, or maybe like she’s not surprised at all. She does come outside, though, and crosses the street to Alex’s hiding spot. Alex wants to tell her to go away, that he’s too dangerous to be around kids, but then he notices something very fucking weird about the baby she’s holding.

Namely, that he’s blue.

And has a tail.

What the fuck?

“Hey,” the lady says, sitting down next to Alex. 

Alex watches her and the kid. He wonders if that blue skin is as soft as David’s. His tail looks sort of sharp. Do they have to put a sock on it when he goes to bed so he doesn’t scratch himself while he’s sleeping?

“You talk or what, kid?” the lady asks.

Alex looks at her. She’s really pretty, he notices. Her hair looks really soft.

“Yeah,” he tells her. “Yeah, I talk. What about it?”

She shrugs easily, hoisting the blue baby up onto her shoulder.

“Just checking in,” she says, and she smiles at him. “Charles called. He said you might be over this way by now. He’s worried about you.”

“He should be,” Alex says, remembering the wrecked and smoking bench. “I’m dangerous.”

The lady snorts out a laugh.

“What’s funny?” Alex asks, not sure yet if he should be offended.

“Nothing at all,” she says. “But I think you’re underestimating my brother. He wouldn’t have taken you in if he thought you were a danger.”

“Your brother?” Alex asks, but he looks at her kid and remembers how mutations are supposed to run in families.

“Charles,” she says, and it doesn’t surprise him.

“But I am dangerous,” he tells her. “I could really hurt someone. How could they want to keep me even after that?”

The lady sighs. “Look,” she says, “I don’t know what you did. And I don’t care. But we were all wild once, _all_ of us. I won’t say it’s not scary, coming in from the cold, but it is worth it, I’ll tell you that.”

“Wild?”

“Like you,” she explains. “Just a street kid with a garbage bag of clothes and a death wish. We were all like that once. Even me. Even Erik. But Charles doesn’t do lost causes, and he doesn’t ever give up on people. Just remember that, okay?”

Alex is so busy watching her face that he doesn’t realize right away that they’re not alone anymore; Erik is standing behind Alex, just watching the conversation play out.

“You didn’t make it very far,” he comments idly when Alex looks at him. “But you’re delicate, so I won’t hold that against you. This time.”

“I’m not delicate!” Alex protests, standing up. Erik’s got a few good inches on him, but Alex thinks he could hold his own if it came to that.

Erik shrugs like he doesn’t care one way or the other.

“Prove it,” he says, and he turns his back and starts to walk away.

Alex watches him then turns to look at the lady.

“I’m Raven,” she tells him. She nods up at the baby who’s trying to climb up onto her head. “This is Kurt.”

“Alex,” Alex says.

“Nice to meet you, Alex,” she says. “Now go home. My brother has something he wants to show you.”

XXXXX

Alex catches up to Erik and they walk the rest of the way to the house in silence. That’s the good thing about Erik, Alex decides: he doesn’t fucking talk when you don’t want him to. He leads the way to through the house and into the backyard, where it turns out everyone has congregated to look at Alex’s shame.

“Ah, Alex!” Charles says excitedly, grinning widely. “Just in time for the show!”

“Show?” Alex asks carefully. What the hell is going on here? Why isn’t Charles mad?

“A demonstration, if you will.” He waves a hand toward Sean, who’s standing a bit away opposite a large freestanding glass window they’ve obviously dragged out from somewhere. 

“Sean, if you would be so kind.”

Sean nods, then takes a deep breath. He opens his mouth and… screams.

The glass in front of him shatters, and Alex takes a step back in alarm.

Wait, what?

Charles and Ororo clap wildly, while Erik nods approvingly.

“That’s not even the half of it,” Charles tells Alex proudly. “We’re working on flight capabilities next.”

“Working on?” Alex repeats dumbly. “You’re… you’re training?”

“Of course,” Charles says. “We can’t expect anyone to be able to control themselves without a bit of practice, can we? And once you have broad control, the next logical step is fine-tuning, is it not?”

As Alex struggles to absorb this concept, Erik says, “Ororo. You’re next.”

Ororo smiles up at him, and she looks so pleased to be asked. It’s completely unlike her to be so cheerful, but it suits her, Alex thinks. She raises both her arms and tips her head back to look at the sky. At first Alex thinks nothing is happening, but then he notices the cloud forming just above their heads. It gets darker and angrier, and then suddenly there are rain drops pelting down all around them.

“Well done,” Erik says. “Gut gemacht.”

Ororo beams. She waves her hands and the rain clears up at once.

Alex shakes his head, fucking confused and now also dripping wet like the rest of them.

“Oh yes, bravo, both of you!” Charles agrees. “Now Erik, love, I believe it’s your turn to impress us.”

“If you insist,” Erik says easily. Alex, who has seen what Erik can do, holds his breath.

Erik raises both hands toward the wrecked bench and the metal of the bench obeys his command, picking itself back up off the ground and reforming into its original shape. It’s done in a less than thirty seconds and then Erik drops his hands, not even winded.

Alex can’t help himself: he cheers this time along with the others.

He’s still confused and his stomach is clenching, but it’s starting to resolve itself into a picture. These people… they’re _all_ mutants. Maybe Alex should have guessed before. Maybe they’re been telling him all along that he wasn’t alone, but he still never thought it was like this. Sean and Ororo… their powers aren’t little harmless things. They could be dangerous, too, and they’re not only because Charles and Erik are training them.

That’s… really fucking awesome.

Best of all is the bench: solid and usable and like Alex was never even here. And Charles thinks he can help Alex control the power. He didn’t say that outright, but why else would he be showing Alex all of this? Why else would he dare to let Alex stay?

_I told you before, Alex_ , Charles’s voice says in his mind, _you’re part of something here. You just have to take the chance._

Yeah, Alex thinks. Okay. Maybe that’s something he can do, after all.


	7. Chapter 7

Alex tries to let himself relax after that. It’s not exactly easy sometimes, especially at night when his body keeps him awake and uncomfortable. He stares at the dark ceiling sometimes and thinks, What the fuck am I doing?

He doesn’t deserve this chance they’re giving him, he knows that. Even if he’s not technically a danger to them (or at least, he’s less of a danger than he might be to other people), he’s still not the good kid he thinks Charles and Erik deserve. He’s still Alex and he’s still a train-wreck, no matter what anyone else says about it.

Of course, then his thoughts will inevitably turn to what he can do to make himself better. If he’s more helpful, more pleasant to be around, would these guys genuinely start to confuse him for a kid they want to keep forever? 

Or have they already started to do that? Sometimes it kind of seems like it. It’s not just all those nice words they told him when he fucked up those times. It’s other stuff, too. Like when Alex is downstairs hanging out with the other kids and maybe letting David crawl all over him, and Charles comes downstairs and gives them all this smile like he can’t think of anything that could make him happier. Or when Alex sets the table without being asked and Erik gives him an approving nod. Or sometimes Sean will look up from his game after he beats a big bad guy and give Alex this smile, like they’re sharing the moment. Even Ororo gave him a smile the other day when he held her jacket out for her before school

It’s all that stuff and more, and Alex… well, he doesn’t deserve it yet, but maybe someday he will.

XXXXX

Alex falls into a sort of routine. He wakes up, feels sick, goes to school, comes home, does his homework, feels sick, and then has dinner with the family, after which he feels kind of sick. It’s really not so bad, if you don’t count all that time he spends hating his life and his body. And there are lots of times he feels perfectly fine. In the afternoons, he’s mostly okay.

Some afternoons it’s relatively warm out and Charles decides they should all walk down to the park for a while. Sometimes he takes them to the ice cream shop and buys them all double-scoops (Alex’s body never thanks him for that, but he’s so very weak in the face of ice cream). Other times they just stay at home and hang out downstairs. 

One day when they’re screwing around down there after homework, Sean says, “So… you want to take a turn on the PlayStation or what?”

Alex says, “Uh… I dunno man. You seem pretty invested in that thing. I wouldn’t want to take it away from you.”

Sean grins. “Guy’s gotta have a hobby,” he says. “But hey, why don’t you try Warcraft or something?”

“Warcraft?” Alex repeats slowly. He’s heard of it – he doesn’t live under a rock or anything – but he’s never played. “Isn’t that for nerds?”

Sean laughs. “Oh my brother,” he says, laying aside his controller. “You have so much to learn.”

XXXXX

Warcraft, it turns out, is fucking awesome! Alex hasn’t had a hobby (a proper hobby, not the kind where he sleeps with his foster brother for fun) in a really freaking long time. And it’s nice, he’s finding, to have something to do in his downtime and to talk about during lunch. If someone were to ask Alex what he does for fun (and they won’t, he still doesn’t actually have any friends except his foster family) he’d actually have an answer for the first time in… years, probably. He suddenly finds his vocabulary is chalk full of words like agro and guild and dungeon. And he’s not even embarrassed about it.

Luckily, there’s a laptop that lives downstairs and it’s got gaming specs (or something like that, Alex wasn’t honestly paying that much attention when Sean was explaining, too convinced at that point that he wasn’t going to like the game). Even more luckily, Warcraft offers a free trial, which means Alex doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going to get the money to keep playing right away.

After few days, though, Alex does start to worry about that, and this time it’s Ororo that comes to his rescue.

“I need lipstick,” she tells him one day while he’s waiting for updates to load. “Come with me to buy it.”

“Lipstick?” Alex asks, eyeing her critically. “For what?”

Ororo raises an eyebrow and she definitely got that look from Erik.

“Okay, fine,” Alex concedes, because that’s a fairly obvious one. “But how you gonna buy it?”

Ororo looks like she’s got sticky fingers and Alex has been on board with a lot of shady stuff in his life, but he draws the line at outright shoplifting. He doesn’t _actually_ want to go back to the boy’s home. 

“I have money,” Ororo insists. “I can buy it myself.”

Alex snorts. “You and what MasterCard?” he asks.

It turns out, though, that Ororo really does have money of her own. After they hoof it to the store and she’s found the perfect shade of lipstick, she pulls a fucking wad of twenties out of her pocket.

“Whoa!” Alex says, eyes wide. “Where did you get that?”

“It’s pocket money,” she says. “Didn’t Papa give you any?”

“No,” Alex says at once, because he would definitely remember that. He hasn’t been given money in… ever. He’s _never_ been given money. He’s worked odd jobs and saved up to buy things, but he’s never just been given money for free.

He’s still thinking about it later when they get home, and he finds his feet leading him to the office without really getting his brain’s permission. Erik’s in there today because Charles has late classes, and that’s really sort of a pity because Erik still kind of scares Alex a little bit. If he’s got to talk money with one of his fosters, he’d really prefer it to not be this one.

Still, he’s here now and there’s no backing out of it, so he takes a seat on the other side of the desk. There’s a long pause, then Erik looks up at him over the tops of his glasses.

“Yes?”

“So…” Alex starts, then doesn’t know how to continue. But he’s better than this and he knows it, so he squares his shoulders and says, “About money. Ororo said we get an allowance. Is that… is that true?”

Erik says nothing. He blinks once, then again.

“Pocket money,” he says at last. “Hasn’t Charles been giving you that?”

“Uh,” Alex says. “No.”

Erik frowns, and Alex sort of wants to shrink back in his seat, but his shoulders are too stiff to manage it. Instead he holds himself straight as Erik waves a hand at the top drawer of the desk, which pops open by itself. He then proceeds to frown down at _it_ instead of at Alex.

After another long pause, he say, “Gott, it’s started again already.”

Alex wants to ask what’s started again, but he doesn’t quite dare.

“Well,” Erik says, and sighs. “Well. You’re not wrong. This belongs to you.”

He pulls out a handful of green, counts four twenties from the pile and slides them across the desk to Alex.

“You’ve been here four weeks,” Erik tells him. “You get twenty dollars every week. This is eighty dollars. It comes directly from the state stipend. The remainder of the amount is placed into a savings account to be paid out in its entirety when you turn eighteen. In the meantime, this pocket money is yours and yours alone. You may spend it on whatever you like.”

Ordinarily, Alex doesn’t think he’d be okay with this, with foster parents taking money that’s supposed to go to Alex and locking it away where can can’t get it. But on the other hand…

“What about the clothes you bought me?” he asks. “What about food?”

Erik gives him a long look.

“If you were any other child,” he says quietly, “I would tell you to let me worry about that. Children should not have to concern themselves with matters of money. You, however, will be needing those lessons sooner than most.”

Alex doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but he nods along anyway because he really does want to know how it works.

“There are some adults,” Erik goes on, “that have no idea how to run a household on a budget. They encounter a problem and throw money at it. My husband is one of those people. I don’t blame him, as he was never taught anything different.”

It’s weird to hear, not just because Alex has never heard this man say the word husband before, but also because he’s got the distinct impression that Erik isn’t being entirely honest. Something about his expression makes Alex sure that he actually _does_ blame Charles for that, and that maybe it’s caused problems between them before.

“But you can’t live like that,” Erik finishes. “That’s why we’re going to have lessons, you and I. Weekly, after dinner. Wednesdays, perhaps.”

“Right,” Alex says. Erik is gruff and strict, but Alex thinks this is a gift somehow, like maybe Erik really wants to help him.

“And the pocket money?” he asks.

Erik nods, and waves a hand toward it.

“It’s yours,” he says. “Use it how you will. Enjoy your childhood while it lasts, Alex.”

Then he goes back to his work.

And that, Alex thinks, is classic Erik. Not unkind or unhelpful, but somehow still creepy as fuck. Alex takes him at his word; he pockets the money and gets the hell out of dodge.

XXXXX

Alex hadn’t actually realized until Erik reminded him that he’d been with them an entire month. Granted, he’d spent a week of that time trying to get himself kicked out and another two weeks doing everything in his power not to get kicked out. After Alex finds his chill, though, it’s not too bad.

One night as they’re all sitting in the living room, Ororo reminds him again about his award board, which is still blank. She’s just finished pinning an aced test to hers, which is packed full of good grades and certificates and drawings she’s obviously brought home from art class. Sean’s board, meanwhile, has a fair share of tests and graded papers, but also is covered in pictures of very precisely broken glass, a mark of Sean’s prowess with his powers.

Both of them put Alex’s empty board to shame.

“Aren’t you going to put anything up?” Ororo asks, obviously noticing the disparity.

“I don’t have anything to add,” Alex tells her, feeling sort of embarrassed about it.

“Didn’t you have a test earlier this week?” Charles asks, and Alex startles because he didn’t know anyone else had been listening to the conversation.

“Yeah,” he says. “But it wasn’t an ace or anything.”

“But you were proud of it,” Charles says, and damn his telepathy because it isn’t even a question.

“Yeah,” Alex agrees, and it’s the truth.

“Then get the pins,” Charles tells him, and Alex does.

XXXXX

A different night just when the baby starts to rub his eyes and yawn (so cute, Alex thinks, so fucking cute!), Charles says, “Alex, I could use another set of hands around here. Would you mind putting David into his sleeper?”

And no, Alex wouldn’t mind at all, but he doesn’t know how, either. He’s never changed a baby before.

“That’s no worry,” Charles tells him. “I can show you.”

So Alex follows him upstairs and into the nursery, where he doesn’t go very often. There’s a pillow thing (changing pad, Charles tells him) on the dresser, and Alex watches carefully as Charles sets the baby down on top if it and gets him out of his day clothes. It’s not exactly an easy job, apparently, because babies are fucking squirmy. David does his level best to escape at least three times during the changing process, including once when he’s between diapers and bare-ass naked. Eventually, though, the job is done: the baby is changed into his jammies. 

“Wow,” Alex says as Charles picks the baby up afterward. “That was… kind of a process.”

Charles smiles fondly at the kid.

“Oh yes,” he agrees. “Quite. Now, do you want to rock him while he has his bottle?”

“Hell yeah!” Alex says, and takes the baby so Charles can pour the milk.

So Alex sits down on the rocking chair and gives him the bottle Charles brings. Alex cuddles him close as he drinks and looks down at his little button nose and his curly red-brown hair and his tired staring eyes. His skin is still so soft and he's so snuggly and pliant right now, and Alex hums him a little tune until the kid's eyes start to close.

Afterward, when the baby has almost fallen asleep in Alex’s arms and Charles has shown him how to lay the kid down in his crib gently enough that he won’t wake back up, Alex watches the little guy asleep and thinks, _I really love babies._

 _That’s good_ , Charles tells him silently. _It’ll come in handy_.

As a matter of fact, he’s right, because Raven comes over the next night for dinner and she brings her family. It takes Alex a while to get over her husband (red! So very red!), but it’s easy to see where Kurt gets his looks, at least. He had kind of wondered after meeting Raven the first time how a perfectly ordinary-looking lady managed to give birth to a little blue monkey-demon thing, but after meeting Azazel, everything becomes clear. Well, not everything: the blue coloring is still a bit of a mystery, but the tail at least makes more sense.

Raven, it turns out, could also use another pair of hands, and she lets Alex pick Kurt up and hold him while she gets the spare highchair set up.

“Careful with him,” Azazel says when he sees Alex holding the baby. Alex is a little offended about the whole thing (he’s not going to drop the kid!), but then Azazel adds, “He poofs.”

“Poofs?” Alex asks, confused. He thinks maybe it’s the language barrier causing trouble, because this guy’s English is really fucking great but he’s obviously not a native speaker.

“Poofs,” Azazel confirms. He clasps his hands together in front of him and then pulls them apart in an exploding motion.

Alex side-eyes Kurt, who’s been watching his daddy carefully and giggling. He really hopes this kid isn’t going to explode in his arms. That would be… not good, Alex guesses. 

He looks at the baby. The baby looks back at him, giggles again, and then suddenly Alex is holding nothing but an armful of smoke.

“What the fuck?” Alex says, but just as he’s getting ready to freak out, Kurt is back in his arms, just where he was before and totally, completely solid again.

“Whoa!” Alex breathes.

He hears a laugh from Azazel, and glances up warily. The guy’s smiling, though (and okay, it is a little bit scary to see a demon-guy smiling at you like that), so Alex thinks it’s probably okay.

“Poofs,” Azazel says again, and this time Alex understands. “Can’t go far, but won’t be long now.”

“Well, shit,” Alex says, and Azazel laughs again.

XXXXX

Alex gets sick again that night, but it’s not as bad as usual, and when he wakes up in the morning, he feels obscurely better. He showers and has breakfast with everyone else without feeling sick once. It’s got to be a fluke, he figures, and keeps waiting all day for the sick feeling to come back. He can barely remember what it was like to have a really good day like this, and to be honest, he’s too shaken up by the whole thing to let himself enjoy it.

By the time school lets out and they head home, Alex has started to wonder if he might be dead. Can’t be sick when you’re dead, right? He spends the afternoon subtly pinching himself, trying to convince himself this is his real life still.

He’s not the only one to notice something’s up, either.

“So,” Sean says during what must be a slow part of his game, “are you done being sick now, or what?”

Alex shrugs, not looking up from his screen. He’s just wandered into Venture Co. territory and his prospects don’t look good. 

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I hope so. That was fucking rough.”

“Morning sickness, man,” Sean says. “Remind me never to get pregnant, huh?”

Alex isn’t really paying attention, too busy fighting off fucking goblins to keep the conversation going. A few minutes later, though, after he’s managed to get back into neutral territory, he realizes what Sean said.

“Wait,” he says, pausing and turning to look at Sean. He’s torn between laughing and asking Sean what he’s been smoking. “What?”

“What?” Sean asks back, but he’s got a baddy of his own to fight and now he’s the one not paying attention.

“You just said…” but Alex trails off, because he’s definitely lost Sean to the game. And anyway, it was just a stupid joke. Right?

XXXXX

After dinner that night, Ororo says, “Papa, let’s work on my life book!”

Charles nods and says, “Yes, alright. Grab down the supplies, won’t you, darling?”

Ororo bolts off upstairs and comes back a few minutes later with a scrapbook under one arm and a box of craft paper under the other. She sets both of these on the floor, and Alex – foreseeing a disaster – grabs up David before he can tear into anything.

Erik gives him a nod of thanks.

“Sean?” Charles asks, voice sort of… careful. “Do you want to work on yours, as well?”

Sean looks at the book in Ororo’s hands, then frowns in a way Alex has never seen him do before.

“Nah,” he says, looking away again. “I’m good.”

“That’s fine,” Charles says, and touches his arm gently. “It’s your book. It’s your choice.”

“Alex!” Ororo says suddenly, “Can I take your picture for my book?”

Alex doesn’t really know what’s going on, but he shrugs anyway.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

He pulls David into a hug and they both cheese while Ororo snaps his picture with a digital camera she’s produced from somewhere.

“Ororo is updating her life book,” Charles explains as she runs over to pester Erik about printing the picture out immediately. “It’s the story of her life in picture form. It’s very important that we don’t forget where we come from, no matter where we might end up.”

Alex thinks about the photo album stuffed in his sock drawer upstairs and nods, because he gets that.

From the other side of the room, Erik says, “Alright, no need to nag. I’ll print it out for you.”

Ororo cheers and then races back to her book, flipping it open to a page near the back where Alex can see two pictures already pasted: one of David in a newborn basinet, and one of Sean in front of a fish tank. There’s space for maybe one more picture, Alex notices, and he feels sort of honored that she wants to give that space to him.

Charles notices the spacing issue as well. “You’ll need to start a new page soon, darling,” he tells her, and rakes a hand through her hair.

“How soon?” she asks, grabbing up a paper picture frame and adding paste to three sides.

Charles holds up his hand up, palm facing her and fingers all displayed like he wants a high-five. Ororo doesn’t give him one, just grins and puts the frame into the space on the page.

“That’s plenty of time,” she tells him.

Alex wants to ask, but David chooses that moment to yank painfully on his hair and start hollering, so that really needs Alex’s attention more than whatever Charles and Ororo are talking about. By the time he’s bounced David into submission (he learned the baby bounce fucking quick, okay!), Erik is back with the freshly-printed picture.

“Thank you, Daddy!” Ororo says, and slots it into the waiting picture frame on the page.

Alex watches her fondly and doesn’t know how he could have ever thought she was evil. She’s just… reserved, is all, and even then it’s only until she starts to trust you. Seeing her so smiley right now, Alex is glad she took a chance on him. 

“Do you want to see the rest of my book, Alex?”

Alex does. He passes the baby off to Charles and lets Ororo snuggle up next to him on the couch. She takes him page by page, letting him see her past one picture at a time. There’s a picture at the beginning of her birth mother (dark skin, white hair, and so fucking young it almost hurts) pasted against a background of watercolor rainclouds that Ororo must have drawn herself. It doesn’t look sad or angry, though. It looks… profound.  
There are a few pages after that of different people – some with real photos and some only with childish drawings Ororo must have done when she was younger. The labels make it clear these were Ororo’s first foster family. Were they a placeholder family the way Alex’s first fosters were? Or did they take her in and pretend they wanted her only to give her up later?

Immediately after that, though, the pages start to be filled with pictures of Ororo, Charles, and Erik all looking happy together, with cheerful drawings alongside and flowery backgrounds. All three of them look a few years younger, Alex notes; Ororo can’t be more than eight or nine in some of those early pictures and Charles looks hardly out of his teenage years (though to be fair, he still sort of looks like that when he gets excited). 

The dates on these pages tells Alex it was only about three years ago when they brought Ororo home, and Alex wonders what made them decide to do that? They were obviously young then (they’re still young now). Did they just wake up one morning and decide they wanted to be parents and knew their options were limited to adoption and surrogacy? Or was it something else? Did they just see Ororo and know they wanted her forever? A kid would have to be pretty special for Charles and Erik to decide to keep them forever, Alex knows that by now.

After they’ve gone through all the pages, Charles asks, “What do you think? There’s a book with your name on it if you’re interested… Well, it doesn’t actually have your name on it yet, but that could fixed in a matter of moments.”

A month ago, Alex would have laughed in his face or possibly just gotten up and walked out. But that was before, back when he thought he’d never be anywhere long enough to even think about putting down roots like this. Now, though… it might be different.

“I’ll think about,” Alex says, and he promises himself that he really will.

XXXXX

Alex doesn’t sleep well that night. Not for emotional reasons, but because of his stupid heartburn. He tosses and turns and tries to put up with it, but at last decides he can’t do it anymore and trudges across the hall to the bathroom. He could have sworn he saw some antacid in here the other day when he was digging around for a new toothbrush (his had an accident involving the toilet bowl that Alex just doesn’t want to think about).

Luckily, he’s remembering right: in the back corner of the lower cupboard, there’s an unopened bottle of Tums. Alex grabs it and rips the plastic off the top, then pounds back a few. Then he has to cough and drink some water, because holy crap those things are gross.

He looks at himself in the mirror afterward. He’s pale and sweaty and clutching the Tums like a lifeline. He’s also… somehow not as skinny as he’d like to be after having just suffered through a month and a half of being sick all the time.

Morning sickness, Sean had joked downstairs. But that’s stupid, because Alex hadn’t just been sick in the morning. He’d been sick all fucking day sometimes and when he hadn’t been sick, he’d been tired. Those things aren’t the same as morning sickness… right?

And anyway, Alex is a guy. He can’t get pregnant. He doesn’t have any of those girl parts that you need to make babies. Right? 

Right?

With sweaty palms, Alex puts the Tums back into the cupboard and reaches for the other thing he knows is down there, the thing he found his first night here and dismissed as a random misplaced artifact. It’s still there: tiny and foil-wrapped and just asking him to do something stupid.

This whole situation, Alex decides suddenly, calls for a lot more thought than he’s given it. He can’t just go around peeing on a stick without knowing the facts first. Alex knows, is absolutely certain that he’s a guy. He’s definitely not a girl. But… does that mean he can’t get pregnant? He would have laughed about it yesterday maybe, but then again, just yesterday he’d been sick all morning.

Before he can change his mind, Alex leaves the test on the counter in the bathroom and sneaks downstairs to the playroom. The laptop is already on his profile from earlier, so Alex just has to open an internet browser and type his question.

But… what to ask?

Slowly and feeling very stupid about it, Alex types ‘male pregnancy.’

The results are… not as straightforward as he might have hoped. For one thing, there’s a crap ton about transgender guys who were born with girl parts and just kept some of them as adults. Which is informative, but Alex has visual proof in the form of a naked baby picture that he was not born with girl parts. So… those results are ultimately useless. As are the results about seahorses, which are fucking cute but not exactly relevant.

Alex pages through a few tabs of results, and the more he reads, the more confident he becomes that this whole thing is ridiculous. Whatever is going on inside Alex’s body, it’s definitely not a baby. He’s not a seahorse and he’s not trans, so he definitely, definitely can’t be pregnant.

But that’s when he sees the link about the X-gene.

Heart pounding, palms sweating, Alex clicks the link. It takes him to a scholarly article. Now, Alex has done a bit of research for classes at school and he knows Wikipedia isn’t exactly a good reference point, but trying to read through this article with all its fancy academic lingo is fucking torture. What Alex would not give in that moment to have Wikipedia article on male pregnancy. Specifically x-gene related male pregnancy. Which is apparently a thing. 

“Rare but not inconceivable” the article tells him. “Secondary or tertiary mutation” the article tells him. “Fifteen confirmed cases in the United States in the last four years,” the article tells him.

Alex swallows hard against the acid reflux that’s trying to make a comeback. Because… holy shit! Holy fuck shit! This is real! X-gene pregnancy is a totally, legitimate real thing, and Alex… he could have that!

There’s a noise from upstairs just then and Alex closes out of his browser and gets his ass back to bed. He makes it back to his room without seeing anyone else, for which he is so fucking grateful because he doesn’t know how to explain what he was doing downstairs half the night.

Even when he’s back in bed, though, he can’t sleep. He lies there, staring at his ceiling and turning the new information over and over in his head. Morning sickness, check. Unprotected sex within the last few months, check. X-gene, check.

But no, that’s stupid. He tells himself it’s stupid over and over again. He’s not pregnant. He’s not. He can’t be. There’s no point in even checking because it’s definitely, absolutely not true.

Eventually, just before dawn, Alex goes back to the bathroom down the hall and pees on a stick. Then he waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someday I'm going to write a fic where someone who throws up all the time really actually just has vertigo or a persistent flu and you guys are going to be so shocked...


	8. Chapter 8

Over the next few days, Alex manages to half-convince himself he’s imagining the entire thing. After all, what’s more likely: Alex being fucking pregnant or Alex just having a weird-ass dream? He’s long since ditched the pregnancy test (buried it underneath the other garbage in the bathroom because he’s not fucking stupid, okay?) so now all that’s left for proof of anything actually happening is the memory of a pink plus sign on a tiny, blurred display window. 

And okay, if Alex is being honest with himself, he doesn’t exactly think he made the whole thing up. A dream would be nice to believe, and that’s how he prefers to think about it, but at night when he can’t sleep or during class when he lets his mind wander, he knows that the whole thing really did happen. But… that doesn’t mean it’s true, right? Lots of people get false positive pregnancy tests, right? Right?

After a few days of agonizing about it, Alex decides he’s going to have to do some more research on the subject. Just to prove to himself that it wasn’t really real and he’s not really pregnant. So instead of logging onto Warcraft after school like he would ordinarily, Alex angles the laptop so none of the others can see what he’s doing and then brings up Google.

‘False positive pregnancy tests’, he types, and is gratified when there are a shit-ton of links to click on.

At first, it seems pretty hopeful. Apparently there are a ton of reasons a test might come back as positive even if you’re not pregnant. Like if you’ve got cysts on your ovaries (oh god, does Alex even have ovaries?!), or if you’ve been taking fertility medication (that, at least, Alex can rule safety out). Other reasons include: letting the test sit too long, using an expired test, or early miscarriage.

Alex decides to rule out early miscarriage for his own sake of mind (because… how would it come out? And for that matter… how would a fucking fully-formed baby come out, either? God, he doesn’t even want to know). But that still leaves a few other options. Alex can’t say for sure that the pregnancy test wasn’t expired or that he didn’t let it sit too long that night. He was pretty well freaked out by the time he actually got around to peeing on it, so maybe he fucked something up.

He decides he’s going to have to try again. He’ll get a few different brands this time, he thinks. He’ll make sure they’re all in date and then follow the directions exactly. And they’ll give him negatives. They’ll have to. And the sooner the better because Alex really, really wants to be able to stop stressing about this whole thing.

“Hey, Ro,” he says, exiting out of his search page, “You need more lipstick or something?”

Ororo frowns, nods, and says, “Eyeshadow.”

“Perfect,” Alex says. “Let’s go to the store.”

Sean elects to stay behind, which is fine by Alex because that’s one less person he’s going to have to hide his purchases from. Not that Sean would probably notice anyway even if he tagged along – that guy is a fucking space cadet at the best of times. Still, the fewer people who might potentially know about this, the better.

Ororo, of course, is nowhere near as unobservant as Sean, but Alex makes his excuses while she’s pondering the makeup aisle and sneaks two aisles over the family planning session. And okay, that’s a bit of a laugh, the idea that Alex might be _planning his family_. Like that’s something people do every day: plan and want to get pregnant instead of desperately hoping they’re not. And maybe they do, what does he know about it? But he’s betting those hypothetical planning people aren’t sixteen and in foster care, and that makes a huge fucking difference in the end.

Alex is a little bit dismayed to find out how many different kinds of pregnancy tests there are and how expensive they all seem to be. Luckily, he hasn’t actually spent any of his pocket money yet. He picks three different brands at random and then stealths his ass up to the checkout counter. Then he doubles back to the candy aisle and grabs some Cow Tales because they sound fucking good and also because Ororo is probably going to want to know what he bought and it’s not like he can show her the pregnancy tests.

After all that’s paid for (and holy crap, Alex is hemorrhaging money here!) he circles back to the makeup aisle where Ororo is still deliberating.

“What did you buy?” she asks, eyeing the bag.

“It’s a surprise,” Alex tells her, and then prays that the only surprise waiting for anyone later tonight is a few pieces of candy.

XXXXX

Alex decides he can’t wait until that night to go through with it, so he tells Ororo he’s got something he has to do in his room, and then he locks himself in the upstairs bathroom with one of the tests.

No mistakes this time, he thinks, and reads the directions from front to back. Then he follows them to the fucking letter. He pees on the stick, sets his timer, and then there’s nothing left to do but wait. And wait. And wait some more. Not too long, though, and when the alarm on Alex’s phone buzzes, he squares his shoulders, takes a deep breath, and looks into the display window.

Two pink lines.

Fuck.

“God damn it!” Alex says and slams his hand down on the counter. It fucking hurts but Alex revels in it. It isn’t fucking fair! What the hell has Alex ever done to deserve this? Why him, of all the fucking people in the world? Why him?

He throws the test hard into the garbage can and stares at it, pissed. Then he sighs and buries it under other things because he’s not stupid, even if he is angry. And he _is_ angry.

He doesn’t go back downstairs after that, just lies on his bed fuming at the ceiling for the next hour until Erik call him down to dinner. Alex isn’t hungry – his stomach’s too much in knots for food – but he goes anyway because there’ll be questions if he doesn’t and right now Alex just has no words for it.

Dinner doesn’t make Alex feel any better about anything. There everyone is around him, sitting and talking and having a good fucking time, and what right do they have to do that when Alex’s life is falling apart? How can they be so fucking happy about everything when Alex is in such trouble? Alex watches them, glaring, and squishes his noodles into tiny bites he can’t bring himself to eat.

It’s not… it’s not fucking fair.

It all comes to a head when they’re taking turns rinsing their dishes afterward. Alex has his hands in soapy water and the pulverized remains of his pasta. Which is bad enough because his hands are shaky and his head is starting to hurt. Then Sean pushes up right behind him for his turn and starts breathing down Alex’s neck.

Alex tries to nudge him away, tries to get closer to the sink, but Sean realizes what’s going on then. He laughs and gets right up into Alex’s personal space and blows right the fuck onto his neck. 

“Could you back the fuck off?”

Alex doesn’t realize it’s him that’s said it until the room goes quiet. He turns, heart pounding out of his chest and he’s not sure if it’s because he’s afraid or because he’s still so fucking angry about everything. 

“That’s enough,” Erik says quietly.

“Yes,” Charles agrees. “Quite. Alex, come with me.”

Alex looks at them both, at how serious they both look, and he can feel himself start to choke up. Sean and Ororo are both looking at him with wide, scared eyes, like he’s a fucking bomb, and maybe he is. Maybe he always was.

Slowly, not wanting to do it, Alex finishes washing his hands. Then he turns and follows Charles out of the room. They go into the office, which can’t mean anything good. Charles sits behind the desk but when Alex goes to do the same in the other chair, Charles shakes his head and makes him stand instead.

So Alex stands and stands some more and his lower back starts to hurt after a while but still he stands. Meanwhile, Charles goes about his business like Alex isn’t even there: grading for his classes, it looks like. Which is fucking insulting, okay? How dare Charles act like he’s not there, act like Alex isn’t standing there in front of him waiting for something to fucking happen again?

Alex glares at Charles’s bowed head, fuming, letting himself get more and more worked up about it. He goes through the motions: pounding heart, clenched fists, gritted teeth. He’s holding himself so stiffly that his whole body starts to hurt, especially his lower back. But Alex shows no weakness. He’s better than this, stronger than this. He can take whatever this punishment ends up being and he can take the pressure of the lead-up.

Well… maybe. Eventually, Alex’s hands start to unclench on their own, and his shoulders start to droop a bit. But it’s not his fault. He’s fucking tired, okay? It’s just… been a long day, that’s all. He hasn’t been sleeping that well lately, and even though the nausea hasn’t been playing up this past week, the tiredness from before still hits him sometimes.

Just when Alex is starting to think he can’t take the suspense and the aching anymore, Charles looks up at him.

“You can sit,” he says.

Alex dives for the chair.

Charles just looks at him for another long moment after that.

“Alex,” he says quietly, and Alex can’t meet his eyes all of a sudden, so he looks at his feet instead.

“I won’t pretend to know precisely what you’re going through,” Charles goes on. “But I know a bit of it. Enough, I think. Do you want to talk about it?”

Alex doesn’t even want to _think_ about it, let alone talk about it. And anyway, he wouldn’t know where to start. He’s just… completely fucked, that’s what. No matter what happens now, Alex is fucked. And on top of that, he’s even more of a freak than previously advertised, and he doesn’t know what to do with that information. Charles is so… normal. He wouldn’t understand.

So Alex shakes his head.

Charles sighs again. “It’s alright to be angry, you know,” he says. “We all get angry sometimes, and you’ve had a lot to process these past few weeks. But I would appreciate it if you don’t take your anger out on the others, alright?”

“Yeah,” Alex manages. “Okay. Sorry.”

“And if you change your mind about wanting to talk, I’m here for you.”

“Right,” Alex says.

There’s a pause where Alex thinks Charles must be figuring out how bad his punishment is going to be. But then Charles just stands and says, “Alex, can I hug you?”

Alex jerks his head up to look at him, genuinely shocked.

“What?”

Charles smiles wryly. “A hug,” he explains slowly. “You know, where I put my arms around you and squeeze and if you’re feeling up to it you might do the same? I’ve been told I’m rather good at it, you know, but if you think we’re not at that level yet, I do understand.”

A hug? Really? That’s Alex’s punishment?

Charles must see something of his thoughts, because he laughs softly.

“Oh no, dear boy,” he says, coming around the desk. “The waiting was the punishment. This is the recovery.”

He stands in front of Alex, arms outstretched just a bit. Alex thinks, why the fuck not, and lets Charles pull him up and into a hug.

It’s… really fucking nice, actually. Alex can’t remember the last time someone’s touched him like this. Some of his first foster parents might have hugged him like this, back when he was cute and not so much trouble. But it’s been years since then and Alex must have forgotten how much he likes it.

Or else he’s just been having a crappy day and it’s making him all emotional. That is also a possibility. Either way, he lets himself get sucked into it. Charles actually is really fucking great at hugs: he’s soft and gentle and really freaking warm, and his head is at just the right height for Alex to push his face into his hair and blink back a few manly tears. Not that he does that, but he could, if he needed to. It gives him time, too, to get himself together, to get his breathing back under control.

When Charles pulls back, he doesn’t let go right away, but holds Alex’s shoulders and looks up into his face. Alex lets himself meet his eyes this time.

“Alex,” Charles says softly, carefully, like he thinks Alex might be skittish (he might be right), “no matter what happens, we’re not sending you away, alright? You belong here. Remember that.”

He really seems to believe that, Alex thinks, but then again, he doesn’t know the truth. Charles might think he knows all about Alex’s past (and maybe he does) but he doesn’t know about the future, about what chaos Alex is going to bring into his life with this little secret.

But Alex can’t say any of that, isn’t ready to voice it and doesn’t want to see what’s going to happen once he does. So he just nods and forces himself to take a step back.

XXXXX

They go back out to the living room after that, Alex trailing a bit sheepishly after Charles. Everything seems pretty normal when they come in; Erik and Ororo are on the floor with David while Sean is sitting sideways on the chair, squinting down at his phone. They all look up when Charles and Alex come in, but then David decides to grab Erik’s nose, and everyone on the floor gets pretty distracted again after that.

Sean nods amiably in Alex’s direction, so Alex trails over that way and leans against the side of the chair near Sean’s feet.

“So, uh,” he starts, rubbing his neck. It’s been a fucking long time since he’s apologized to anyone and he doesn’t quite remember how it goes. “Sorry about being, you know, a jerk earlier.”

Sean shrugs. “It’s cool, man,” he says. “Sorry about getting all up in your business. I didn’t know you had a sensitive neck.”

Alex also didn’t know that about himself, but apparently it’s true now. Maybe pregnancy makes your skin sensitive?

“I just… had a headache,” Alex says, and that’s sort of right, even if it’s not the whole truth.

Sean nods. “You know what would make it better?”

Alex raises an eyebrow in question.

“Candy,” Sean says, deadpan. “And Ro says you’ve got a stash, so…” He trails off meaningfully.

Alex can’t help it: he laughs.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I might have something like that. Be right back.”

So he shares his candy with the family and it does make him feel a bit better (sugar usually does). Later, though, when he’s lying awake in bed yet again, unable to sleep, he thinks about what Charles told him.

They’re not going to send him away, Charles had said. No matter what. But… that’s only because they don’t know the whole truth. It’s not just that Alex is now a teenage delinquent in more ways than one. No, this also means that there’s going to be another baby soon. And Charles and Erik, no matter how much they might like Alex and want him around, did not sign up to take care of two kids for the price of one. Hell, they spend enough money just on Alex (the clothes, the school lunches, the pocket money, the list just goes on and on). And babies are supposed to be even more expensive than regular kids, right? No way are Charles and Erik just going to fork over a couple thousand more dollars for a kid they didn’t even ask for.

Which means Alex has a choice. He’s going to have to leave, try it on his own like he’d planned before, except with a baby now. Or else he might be able to stay, but he’ll have to give up the baby. But he can’t do that… can he?


	9. Chapter 9

Alex doesn’t get out of bed the next morning. He makes a very deliberate choice to stay under the covers after his alarm goes off. He can hear everyone else talking in the hall, showering and getting ready for the day, but Alex just… doesn’t feel like it. Instead, he pulls the pillow over his head and tries to drown out the sounds.

It doesn’t quite work. He can’t fall back asleep no matter how much he tosses and turns. And anyway, when Alex doesn’t come down for breakfast, people definitely notice. First comes Charles, knocking at his door and saying he’s sorry, but he’s coming in.

He takes in the sight of Alex still in bed, and he doesn’t look mad, just a bit worried.

“Not feeling well?” he asks after a moment. 

Alex just groans and stares up at him with what he hopes is the proper amount of _dead_ to skip school just for today.

“Alright, then” Charles says, holding his hands up in surrender. “We’ll try again tomorrow, shall we?”

Then he leaves, just like that. But it can’t be that easy, right? There’s got to be more to it than that.

There is. 

Half an hour later, just when Alex’s clock is telling him that everyone should be leaving for the day, there’s another knock on his door. And there’s Erik, staring at him like a fucking creeper, eyes bright and sort of scary.

Under ordinary circumstances, Alex might give it all up right then and admit he’s not really sick. But he just… he can’t, not after everything. Not even in the face of Erik’s particular brand of terrifying intensity.

Erik watches him for a long, agonizing minute while Alex trembles under his gaze. Then he blinks and the spell is broken.

“We’re leaving,” Erik says. “Call if you need anything. Don’t go anywhere.”

Alex nods quickly in agreement, and only really starts to breathe again once Erik is out of the room and tromping back downstairs. Then Alex collapses back onto his pillows, pulls his covers over his head and thinks, what the fuck?

Once the house is quiet, Alex does sort of manage to go back to sleep. He’s still so fucking tired, and he really, really doesn’t want to get up and face the day yet. So he doses a bit fitfully, tossing from side to side and manages to get drool all down his pillow.

When he finally makes himself get out of bed, it’s midmorning. He’s missing math class right now but he doesn’t have many fucks left for that, not when he’s got so much else to worry about and not when he’s so tired. What he needs, he thinks, is energy. Like a Red Bull or something.

Actually, though, is he even allowed to have those now that he’s preggers? And what about other things he can’t have? He can’t smoke or drink, even he knows that (and to be honest, he wasn’t really doing those things even before all this), but there have be other things, too, right?

He decides he’d probably better visit his old friend the internet, so he makes his way downstairs to the playroom. He honestly just plans on doing a quick Google search and reading whatever comes up, but before he can even get to that point, he notices a whole new pile of books sitting waiting to be added to the many, many bookshelves that line the room.

It’s not as weird as all that, though Alex has never been in a house where they just brought books in by the dozen. But sometimes, every few weeks, either Charles or Erik will come home with loads of new books for the playroom. These guys are definitely professors, there’s no getting away from it, and they like their foster kids to be well-read. Alex doesn’t particularly mind, especially when he finds the occasional gem of a book in the new piles.

This pile, it looks like, is mostly for Ororo: a few American Girl books, some Dear Americas, some Lonely Planet stuff. There’s also, Alex notes with surprise, a teach-yourself-guitar book that must mean Charles has noticed Sean stalking the music store when they hang out at the shopping center. Which is, you know, pretty cool.

Under all that, though, are some other books, ones that take Alex by surprise. _Exploring Your Unplanned Pregnancy_ , one says, and the table of contents has some promising sections on single motherhood (hah!), as well as abortion and adoption. Alex doesn’t know how abortion would work or if it’s even possible and he doesn’t know how to find that out. But adoption. Well, that’s an always an option. Something to think about, at least.

There are other books, too, ones about pregnancy and baby development. He’s not quite sure what these are all doing in the kids’ library pile, but Charles is always talking about sex education, so maybe it’s all part of that.

Either way, Alex gathers up the books that look like they could help and takes them back up to his room. He takes the laptop, too, because some of this shit is definitely going to need auxiliary research. 

He spends most of the morning and early afternoon picking through the books, trying to figure out what’s relevant to him and what only applies to actual girls. It’s a fucking process and completely overwhelming (especially the part where there’s an actual living thing growing inside him, and he’s definitely going to have to table that freak-out for a later date, because it’s going to be a big one).

In the end, he manages to cobble together a decent list of things he’s absolutely going to need if he wants to take care of this baby. Some of the things are only going to be relevant if he ends up keeping the kid for good (something he also has to come back to later once he’s had more time to process), but other things he’s going to need immediately and for the remainder of the pregnancy (and oh God, he’s still not over it – how the fuck is he pregnant? How is this his life?)

The list goes something like this:

For Alex –   
• Prenatal vitamins (coincidentally, the ones Charles gave him before should work for now, though he’ll have to resupply eventually)  
• Larger hoodies and sweaters to hide the baby bump (colorful enough to distract, not so much to draw unwanted attention)  
• Stretchy pants (sweat pants?)  
• Body pillow?

For baby –  
• Crib (maybe one of those pack ‘n play things?)  
• Diapers/wipes  
• Onesies  
• Stuff for feeding (bottles? formula? oh god, he can’t even think about breastfeeding right now)  
• Baby carrier?  
• Changing pad  
• Baby shampoo

Okay, so there are probably things missing from the list, but Alex has never actually taken care of a baby before (not counting the few times he’s put David to bed) and he doesn’t exactly know what all goes into it. Either way, this stuff isn’t going to come cheap, and Alex doesn’t have a job. He’ll have to… quit school and find one, probably.

The internet says it’s best to get baby stuff used or free. Alex is all about free, but the only people he knows who have babies are Charles and Erik, and Raven and Azazel. And it’s not like he can ask any of them for hand-me-downs or anything. He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to keep this baby thing a secret forever, but the less people who know for now, the better.

Also, the books and internet tell him he should probably go the doctor at some point. That’s not as easy as it might be for a couple of reasons, though. For one thing, Alex isn’t actually a girl, so there’s always a chance that any doctor he goes to isn’t going to be mutant friendly (and the very last thing he needs right now is more complications). Also, he doesn’t know what his insurance does or doesn’t cover. Even if the state insurance covers things for girl-fosters to have babies (and he’s never had reason before now to even think about that, so who knows if that’s true), he doubts very much he’ll be covered. Alex doesn’t want to be one of those kids who has a baby in the bathroom all alone, but if the insurance doesn’t cover it, what choice does he have? Not like he’d ever be able to pay for it on his own. (Also… also! How the fuck is this baby going to come out of him?)

For the immediate future, though, Alex has a plan: he’ll keep saving up his pocket money, hide getting fat as best he can, and deal with everything else at some point in the future. There’s enough room in his closet that he can start to buy some baby things and keep them hidden there. Just as long as Charles and Erik never come in and go through his stuff without asking.

Because that’s Alex’s most immediate concern right now. No matter what Alex decides to do about this baby, Charles and Erik are definitely going to find out eventually, and when they do, they’re going to be really freaking disappointed. And even though Alex has so much more to worry about than that, it’s still somehow an awful thought. So number one priority: keep Charles and Erik from finding out for as long as possible. Everything else he can deal with later.

XXXXX

Alex feels a bit better after making his plan (not a whole lot, he’s still in a shit-ton of trouble, but at least he’s got a timeline now), enough so to ease into his first act of business: being sneaky. That means no more skipping class, no more acting moody or sick, no more doing anything that an ordinary teenage boy wouldn’t do.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, to be honest. For one thing, Alex suddenly realizes that babies are all over the place. He’s sure there weren’t so many of them before he knew he was pregnant, but now there’s a baby or baby stuff everywhere he turns. Like, he goes to school and there’s a mom there dropping off her kids with a car seat in the back. Or there’s a pregnant lady on the bus fondling her stomach in the most freaking obvious manner possible (doesn’t she know how that looks?). They go to the store for new shoes for Sean, and Alex finds himself caught in the thrall of the baby aisle.

It’s an eye-opening experience, to say the least. In some ways, though, it’s being around David that’s the worst part. David was always there so Alex should be used to it by now, but for some reason he never noticed how much _stuff_ David needs. He’s got a fancy crib, a million clothes, toys all over the place. He goes through like a dozen diapers a day and he eats real people food, but he eats a ton of it. He has his own nursery and two bouncy seats and a rocking horse and more books than Alex can even count.

It just… it breaks Alex’s heart a little bit, because he knows that no matter how much he tries, he’s never going to be able to give his baby all this stuff. He doesn’t even know how he’s going to buy the kid really basic needs like clothes and food.

Maybe that means adoption is the right choice here. Alex doesn’t know exactly how he feels about the kid yet – they haven’t bonded or anything stupid like that – but he wants what’s best for it. As much as it hurts his pride to think, maybe Alex just can’t be that. Maybe it would be better in the long run if some rich couple took this kid off his hands and gave it a nice life. And maybe… maybe that would also be the best option for Alex. After all, he does want to stay with Erik and Charles, and he can’t do that if he keeps the baby. So for both of their sakes, adoption might be the right answer.

Of course, Alex isn’t without reservations on that front. He’s been in the system, okay, and he knows how fucked up it can be. He’s heard a lot of good things about people finding forever homes (or maybe he’s thinking of the animal shelter…) but he’s also lived through some really fucked up shit. He doesn’t want that kind of life for his kid – shuffled from one place to another with people who don’t really care or if they do care they don’t know how to show it. Babies, though… people always want babies. Babies always get forever homes, don’t they? If Alex found the right couple, the right forever home for this kid… it might not be so bad.

Right?

XXXXX

Alex tries to do the math at one point, for his peace of mind if nothing else. It’s hard, though, because he doesn’t actually know when he got knocked up. He was living with the Blandings for six months and he and Todd were fucking for at least four months of that time. He doesn’t know how it works for guys with this particular mutation, but the pregnancy books seem to all say girls have to be at a certain point in their cycle (which sounds kinda gross, to be honest) to be able to conceive (also a gross word). If that’s how it works for Alex, too, well… it actually brings up a lot more questions than it answers.

Like okay, if Alex has this magical uterus all up in there, why the fuck has he never had a period? Don’t those things go hand-in-hand? And how did Todd’s jizz even find its way to the magical uterus? Is there some kind of trail that leads from the inside of his ass to the baby-making section of his body? Is that an automatic reaction that his body does on its own? Alex’s other mutation is (mostly) under his control, but he’s damn sure he never looked at Todd Blanding and thought, _oh yes baby please impregnate me!_ Which means that Alex’s body must have done all this on its own. But why now? Did he always have this mutation and it was just waiting for him to get fucked, or did the fucking somehow trigger it? If Alex wasn’t gay and wasn’t interested in taking it up the ass, would he have ever found out about this whole thing, or would he have gone his entire life thinking he was completely ordinary inside? Or was the it the mutation that made him gay?

Also… where’s the baby going to come out? It’s something Alex puts off thinking about for as long as possible, but the question haunts him at night. Surely… surely it’s not going to come out the same way the sperm went in. Right? Or, even worse, is the baby going to pop out of his chest Alien-style? Or maybe Alex is just going to develop outside girl-parts to go with his inside girl-parts. What would it be like to have a vag all up there under his balls? Or would it be a straight swap, balls for vag? God, he’s never going to get laid again if that’s the case.

But maybe getting laid was never an option again, anyway. After all, who knows what kind of damage this little monster is going to do to Alex’s body even without an Alien-style blood bath. Like… Alex isn’t actually very curvy as a person. He’s kind of skinny and okay he’s got a bit of muscle but he’s mostly just flat. But aren’t pregnant women supposed to have… hips and things? And what about breasts? Alex’s chest is aching all the time now and he’d better dollars to fucking donuts that means he’s going to end up with a rack. Which would be one less expense in terms of getting the kid fed, but what is that going to look like from a purely aesthetic perspective? Is Alex doomed to forever be a guy with tits? It would be like being a bearded lady, but at least she could get herself a nice wax job.

So… yeah. Some answers to those questions would be nice. Unfortunately, Alex can find nothing like a how-to guide in his online research, and none of the books he smuggled from the library downstairs are geared for his particular set of the population. Which means he mostly just tries not to think about those things during the day and instead lets them swirl around his head while he’s trying to sleep at night.

About the timeline, though. That might be a bit easier to narrow down, though probably not by much. He and Todd maybe started fucking in June, just after school let out. It’s now November. That means that Alex can’t really be more than five months pregnant. He might even be a bit less than that. If Alex does have a cycle and it does last a month, then he might even be closer to four months pregnant. If a pregnancy lasts ten months (and there’s nothing saying Alex’s will, but it’s the best guess he has right now), he’s got another five months or so to prepare. He doesn’t necessarily think he’ll be able to keep his secret that long (once he starts getting super fat it’s going to be hard to hide), but maybe he can hold off for another few months. Hopefully, anyway.

That’s why he starts keeping an eye out for cheap baby things. He sees a sale on baby shampoo at the drug store and decides he’d better stock up. Raven’s got a ton of hand-me-downs in a bag by her front door when Alex happens to be visiting, so Alex waits until she’s distracted then swipes a few. Someone forgets their plus-size hoodie on the bus, so Alex takes it home and washes it then stuffs it in the closet with all the other things he’s going to need down the line. It’s not stealing, exactly. He’s not taking candy from a baby or anything. It’s more like… being thrifty.

There are some things, though, that he’s absolutely clueless about how to obtain. A crib, for example. Even with his pocket money, Alex isn’t fooling himself into thinking he can afford that. He’s read that babies don’t need cribs right away, that you can literally just stick them in a basket or something, which makes him feel a bit better about the whole thing. But still, even if he had the cash, where would he buy something like that on the sly? It’s not like he could start going out to baby stores without it raising a few eyebrows.

So that’s the way it goes: Alex has no freaking idea what’s going on with his body and no freaking idea how to move forward with his plans. But he’s working on it. And anyway, what other choice does he have?

XXXXX

Well, that’s what he thinks, anyway. But that’s only because he doesn’t know that he’s not the only one keeping freaking secrets around this house.

Okay, okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair. But it sort of feels that way from his perspective.

This is how it goes down:

They’re all sitting at dinner on a normal Tuesday evening. It’s meatloaf tonight and Alex is enjoying himself now but knows the heartburn is going to be unbelievable in a few hours (damn you, fetus!). So there he is, minding his own business, listening with one ear to Ororo giving them the four-day forecast and also sort of thinking about how much his damn nipples hurt.

Then Charles drops his fork and says, “Oh!” in a startled, pained voice. 

The whole table kind of freezes, then there are several people asking frantic questions all at once about if he’s alright, if something’s wrong, if they need him to call 911. Alex watches the commotion, not sure if now is a good time to panic or if he even has a choice in the matter, because his pulse starts to skyrocket on its own and the sweat is suddenly pouring off his skin and holy shit, what’s happening here?

But then Charles waves them all off, and his smile is shaky but definitely there.

“I’m fine, honestly,” he says. “No need to panic, I promise you! Everyone just calm down!”

Then he sort of does… something with his hands, and Alex feels suddenly unnaturally calm. Looking around the table, he can see everyone else feels it, too. Everyone’s faces have gone sort of slack and half-bewitched.

“I’m sorry,” Charles says, and his voice sounds odd to Alex’s ears, slow and like it’s coming from underwater. 

Then he moves his hands again and the odd feeling disappears. The panic from before doesn’t come back, though, and maybe that’s the point.

“I’m sorry,” Charles says again, and his voice is completely back to normal now. “I wouldn’t have done that, but David needed a moment.”

Alex chances a look at the kid, who does indeed look a little traumatized.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asks almost involuntarily. Maybe it’s because of how much time he’s been spending with the kid and maybe it’s because baby welfare is suddenly at the top of his list, but the idea that something might be wrong with David is suddenly terrifying for Alex.

“Same thing as everyone else. I just frightened him. But it’s more difficult for telepaths, and David doesn’t have all the shields in place that a fully developed telepath would. He has trouble differentiating at times between his own emotions and those belonging to other people.”

“Wait,” Alex says, and he holds a hand up, because he needs a freaking minute to process this. “What? David is a telepath?”

Everyone sort of stares at him like this is definitely something Alex should know. But come on, how the fuck would he have ever guessed that? It’s not like David can even really talk, let alone acknowledge that he might be reading Alex’s mind!

“Yeah, man, where have you been?” Sean asks.

Alex glares, because he is so not going to take that from Sean of all people!

“It wasn’t in the initial lecture,” he grits out.

Erik snorts. 

“He has you there,” he says. To Charles, he adds, “You sure you’re okay? Is it the baby?”

Alex’s eyes flit back to David automatically. He looks fine now – maybe a little wide-eyed and watching Charles and Erik very closely, but not damaged or anything.

“It was,” Charles agrees. “But nothing to worry about. She was only kicking. I honestly didn’t mean to worry anyone. It was just stronger than usual and a bit uncomfortable.”

Those words set off another wave of commotion and all of a sudden both Sean and Ororo are up out of their chairs and around the table to Charles’s side. Alex is still entirely baffled about what’s going on, about what baby they’re even talking about, if not David. His hand sort of instinctively goes to his own belly, but then he realizes he’s being stupid and immediately moves his hand away before anyone can notice.

“Can I feel her, Papa?” Ororo is saying, voice higher and more excitable than usual as she sort of clings to Charles. Sean, too, has abandoned his usual chill to try to get a hand in there and feel Charles up. David, obviously taking his queues from the others, starts yelling and making grabby hands in that direction.

Erik, at least, has his head still on his shoulders.

“That’s enough, all of you,” he says, and okay, maybe he doesn’t sound as stern as he might under other circumstances. “Back to your seats. There will be plenty of time to feel the baby after dinner.”

Ororo and Sean turn pleading eyes on Charles, who laughs and gently shoos them away.

“She won’t do it on command, anyway,” he tells them. “Perhaps if you’re patient, she can be persuaded to try it again after dinner.”

He looks directly up at Alex, then, and Alex’s heart stops because there’s something in eyes that Alex recognizes in that moment.

“You would think,” Charles says easily, almost carelessly, “that by the second pregnancy it would stop being such a surprise to feel something moving inside you. But it really doesn’t, I’m afraid. Maybe it’s just one of those things that never stops seeming odd.”

And that, that right there, is how Alex finds out that when Moira said ‘biological child’ she really, legitimately meant it. Because apparently David was _not_ birthed by a surrogate like Alex has assumed. He was not created from either Charles _or_ Erik, but from both.

Alex, it turns out, is a fucking idiot, because he’s had an expert in front of him all this time and didn’t even realize it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's an interesting tidbit to demonstrate Alex's cluelessness: he also doesn't know that Raven is blue! In a few months she's finally going to change in front of him and he's going to get quite the shock.


	10. Chapter 10

The coincidence is almost un-fucking-believable. Like seriously, there have been, what 15 reported male x-gene pregnancies in the last couple of years, and two of them manage to end up in the same damn house at the same damn time? What are the freaking odds of that happening? Of all the fucking foster placements for Alex to end up, how in the goddamn hell did Alex end up with this one? Not only gay, not only mutant, but also has a freaking rare-ass mutation and it’s active at the same time as Alex’s is?

What the hell? Is the universe fucking with him? Or is this supposed to be some kind of karma thing? Like maybe the universe figured Alex has had a whole bunch of shitty placements so now it’s going to throw him a bone.

Alex doesn’t know, and thinking about it makes his head hurt, so he pretty much just decides to take it at face value. Besides, he’d be an idiot not to take advantage of this opportunity.

Alex’s stealth campaign after that expands to include finding out as much information as possible about Charles’s pregnancy. He still feels like a huge dummy about the whole thing, but maybe that’s inevitable. The new information does, at least, make sense of a ton of questions Alex never really had answers to before. Like how David looks so much like both Erik and Charles. Or why, instead of donating or trashing the clothes Kurt has grown out of, Raven keeps sending them back over here. Or why Charles is way more roundish in the middle than anywhere else. It even clears up why there was a random pregnancy test in the cupboard that night Alex first found out he was preggers.

Thinking back with this new perspective, there are even times Alex can remember when Charles had been talking about the baby and the context hadn’t quite made sense for it to be about David. Like he would say something like, “The baby’s very restless today,” but David would be napping at the time. Things like that. Alex had pretty much dismissed it all as some sort of telepath thing and immediately forgotten about it. It just hadn’t seemed important when Alex had (still has) his own problems to worry about.

Now, though, Alex is taking notice, and he wants answers. That means he’s got to talk to Charles, which might be dangerous. It’s never a good idea to talk to a telepath while you’re trying to keep a secret, Alex figures, but while Charles occasionally knows what Alex is going to say before he says it, he’s never actively brought up anything Alex wants hidden. It gives Alex hope that his secrets aren’t just being broadcasted out there for any stray telepath to pick up. And anyway, he’s got to chance it. He can’t not talk to Charles about it, not now that he knows the truth.

So after dinner, Alex waits until Sean and Ororo have both taken their turns at trying to get the baby to kick, then snags the seat next Charles for himself once they’ve wandered off.

“Do you want to feel, as well?” Charles asks.

Alex can feel himself blushing for some reason.

“Here,” Charles says. He grabs Alex’s hand and places it flat on his belly. Alex can feel he’s definitely rounder underneath the sweater than you’d be able to tell just looking at him. Alex takes note of that: clearly Charles is a master of hiding a pregnancy to the outside world by pretending to just be chunky.

“I don’t feel anything,” Alex admits.

“Give it a moment,” Charles says.

He places one hand on top of Alex’s, closes his eyes, and then a moment later, something nudges against Alex’s fingers.

“Oh god,” he breathes. He looks up into Charles’s eyes and he can feel himself smiling. “That’s… really freaking cool!”

Charles grins.

“Glad you think so. I can assure you it’s much less comfortable from the inside.”

“But,” Alex says. He’s got so many questions he doesn’t know where to start. “But how?”

Charles gives him a long look like he’s considering how much Alex actually wants to know. Alex wants to know _everything_ and Charles must be able to sense that.

“It’s a secondary mutation,” Charles starts to explain. “Like any other, really. I’m a telepath first and foremost, but I was under, er, an usual amount of stress nearly two years ago now, and my body compensated by manifesting a second ability. It isn’t always like that, mind you – some secondary mutations are present at birth, while others manifest in puberty in the same way primary mutations might. But for me, it was an outside stressor.”

Alex considers this. His primary mutation had made itself known at puberty. He’d been thirteen the first time he accidentally blew something up with his powers. His secondary mutation could have shown up at the exact same time and he never would have known it – he’d been a complete virgin until Todd Blanding this past summer.

“But how does it work?” he presses, because he’s got to know. He’s spent so long wondering and he just can’t take it anymore. 

Charles sort of grimaces, and that can mean nothing good.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Charles tells him. “Of course pregnancy is always dastardly complex. Growing a new life inside oneself isn’t exactly a walk in the park, is it? But it’s particularly complicated in this case. Our bodies were made for this – made to keep the species progressing – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s like any mutation, I suppose: it gets the job done and keeps us alive, but it does cause a certain amount of trouble. In this case, the birth process is… rather intense.”

Alex can’t take the suspense.

“How does it come out?” he demands.

Charles sighs. “The body, er, makes itself an opening, I suppose you could say… in the right sort of area, you know.”

“Oh god,” Alex breathes. “So you just, what, walk around with a fucking hole all up in there?”

Charles coughs. “Dear god, no! It heals up, I can assure you!”

Well, that’s something, at least. Not great, but better than the permanent disfigurement Alex was picturing. He lets himself relax a bit with that information while he eyes Charles up.

“So how old is it?” he asks.

Charles laughs a bit, and it might be at Alex’s expense, but hearing it makes him feel better all the same.

“First, she’s a girl,” he says. “Second, one doesn’t traditionally start counting age until birth. But if you’re asking how far along I am, the answer is five months.”

“Five months,” Alex repeats, mulling that over. Potentially, then, Charles could be about a month more pregnant than Alex. Which is good, in a way, because that means Alex can get a heads up on everything that’s going to happen to him before it happens. It’s almost like being a seer.

It also means, he realizes, that if there are things he hasn’t done yet but definitely should have, he can find out now and try to play catch-up.

“Do you have a doctor?” he asks quickly. “Don’t you have to get, you know, sonograms and things?”

“Well,” Charles says, “yes and no. I do have a doctor and strictly speaking we should have seen her already. But she’s been away on other business for the past few months, so the practice has been closed. I’m sure you realize how delicate a situation this is, Alex. Not just any doctor will do. This office should be open again within the next few weeks. Once that happens, I’ll make us the necessary appointments, don’t you worry.”

_Don’t worry_ , he says. Well… why didn’t Alex think of that?

XXXXX

Anyway, after that Alex keeps a closer eye on Charles and tries to get a better idea of what’s going on with him. That’s how he finds himself getting into conversations he never would have imagined back when this whole thing started. About cribs, for instance.

“No,” Charles tells him, “they’re definitely not a must-have at the very beginning. In fact, David slept in our room until he was six months, then we moved him into the nursery. I expect the new one will do the same. After that, perhaps we’ll move her into David’s crib and he’ll be ready for a toddler bed. They’ll probably have to share a room for a while.  
My, this house seems to get more crowded all the time, doesn’t it? But yes, at first she’ll be in our room. That’s definitely my recommendation. Easier for night feedings, you know?”

“Uh,” Alex says, “about that…”

Charles grins like he enjoys making Alex uncomfortable.

“Yes, it’s exactly as undignified as you’re imagining. But it can also be quite pleasurable, both from a hormonal and instinctive standpoint. The breasts never get less strange, however.”

Then Charles pretends not to laugh at Alex’s horrified face.

XXXXX

It still bothers Alex that he was apparently the only one who didn’t know all this time about the pregnancy. Eventually he makes himself ask, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

Charles looks at him very seriously and puts a steadying hand on Alex’s arm.

“Alex,” he says, “I would never intentionally try to deceive you or keep something from you. I won’t force you to talk about anything you don’t want, but I won’t lie to you, either. I just didn’t realize you didn’t know.”

“How would I have known?” Alex asks, kind of offended. He’s not an idiot, he’s just not a fucking telepath.

“Yes,” Charles says. “Exactly! As a telepath, I have somewhat of an extra insight into everyone I meet. I don’t invade their private thoughts if I can help it, but there’s always a bit of extra I can tell about them just from the way they think. I tend to forget that it doesn’t go both ways. Just because I can read it on you doesn’t mean you can read it on me, and I’m not great about remembering that.

“Also,” he says, a bit more sheepishly, “I’ve been… a bit distractible lately. I’m sure you’ve noticed how the sleepless nights tend to get to you, make you more unfocussed during the day.”

“Baby brain,” Erik cuts in from the other side of the room where Alex hadn’t known he was listening in.

That’s Charles’s queue to make a face and start a playful argument, so Alex bows out while he’s still got the chance.

XXXXX

Not everything about pregnancy is doom and gloom, it turns out. Sometimes Alex gets to find out the fun things, too.

“You’ll like this trick,” Charles tells him, reaching for the flashlight. 

Then Alex, Ororo and Sean all watch in awe as the baby plays hide and seek with the light through the skin of Charles’s belly.

XXXXX

Once, when it’s just the two of them, Alex finds the courage to bring up that other thing.

“The deuteranopia?” Charles asks. “It’s a bit worrisome, of course, but not in the immediate sense. It all comes back to the X chromosome, you see. Males traditionally inherit their Y chromosome from their father and their X chromosome from their mother, while females receive an X chromomere from each parent. As neither David nor this little girl has a mother per se, they each receive a copy of my X chromosome, which we already know isn’t deficient because my vision is normal. David gets his Y chromosome from Erik and the disorder can’t be passed on that way, so he’ll be fine. The girl will have one normal and one deficient X chromosome and will therefore have the potential to pass down the disorder to any sons she might have. And while that is certainly concerning on some level, I’ve rather got enough to worry about just now without borrowing trouble from the future.”

“What about x-gene mutations?” Alex asks. “What if it’s something… you know, dangerous?”

Charles smiles and slides a hand down his belly. It’s something Alex has seen him do a million times before he knew the truth, and now he doesn’t know how he missed such an obvious clue.

“I’ve got an idea about what her mutation might be,” he says, but he says it like it’s a secret so Alex doesn’t ask.

“So there’s no chance she’s going to be human?”

He’s not worried about Charles’s baby so much as the one he himself is carrying. Charles can afford to have a mutant baby, but Alex knows that the adoption process (if that’s what he picks) will be a whole lot fucking harder if his kid has an obvious mutation. Like if it’s blue, for instance, and has a tail.

“She’s not,” Charles says. “She could have been, but I can tell by now that she won’t be. But I suppose in the end it’s not hugely different. As I’ve said before, some mutations take their own time to manifest while others are present at birth. If it’s something dangerous, you manage it as best you can, just the same as you would for any human problem that might arise.”

Alex doesn’t know what to think about that. Is it better, he wonders, to have a human baby that will fit in with the rest of the world, or a mutant baby that will always carry a little piece of Alex with it? He can’t decide, and maybe it’s better that he never had a choice in the matter anyway.

XXXXX

Of course, Alex’s fishing tactics also backfire at times. Like sometimes after they’ve been chatty, Charles will look right into Alex’s eyes and say, “Is there something you want to tell me, Alex?”

And then Alex has to immediately shake his head and start thinking about anything but himself, because Charles is a fucking telepath and Alex can’t take any chances. It’ll all come out eventually, he’s always known that, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to come out right this second! Even with all this new information, Alex still has the same concerns he’s always had about this baby – namely that Erik and Charles never signed on to take care of Alex’s baby and so he can’t both keep it and stay with them. If anything, the news that Charles is also pregnant makes all that more urgent, because that means there’ll be even less time and money for Alex once Charles’s baby is born. Charles and Erik have treated Alex better than anyone he’s ever lived with, and he can’t repay them by making their lives harder this way. It just… wouldn’t be right.

It’s enough to make Alex take a good, hard look at adoption. He’s been over the arguments with himself a million times already, and every single time he comes to the conclusion that adoption would be best. This baby hasn’t got a freaking chance with Alex. Alex has no money, no experience, and if he keeps the kid, he’s got no place to go. He’d thought about chancing it on the streets before all this, but that’s no life for a baby and Alex knows it.

On the other hand, if Alex were to give the baby up, maybe they’d both have a real chance at a family. It wouldn’t have to be to just anyone. Alex could pick. He could find the kid a good home with nice rich people and they would love the baby and treat it right and give it all the things Alex never could. And Alex could stay here with Charles and Erik and the kids, and they could be a family, too. It would be the far superior choice all around.

The only reason not to do it is the one reason Alex can’t get around: he just doesn’t want to.

It’s stupid, hugely idiotic, but Alex can’t help thinking of this baby as his. He’s the one giving it life and he’s the only one right now who loves it. He’s the one who should be there to raise it and protect it and show it how awesome and terrible life can be. Okay so maybe he doesn’t have much, but he’s got love, and why isn’t that enough?

But Alex knows the truth. Love is where you’re weakest. Alex is halfway to falling in love with this family and that’s why he doesn’t want to leave, but he’s _completely_ in love with this baby, which is why he knows deep-down what he’s going to do.

He’s never going to give this baby up, even if that means he can never stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But when is the secret going to come out, you ask? Soon. Very soon.


	11. Chapter 11

Alex feels unreasonably better after deciding to keep the baby. He shouldn’t – it doesn’t make any fucking sense at all – but he does. Maybe it’s just the relief of having made a decision after all the agonizing. He knows where his future lies, and it’s with this kid – the one that belongs to him entirely, the one that’s fucking growing inside him.

Alex should definitely not feel as proud as he is about being sixteen and pregnant. He can’t help it, though: there’s just this warm glow inside him when he thinks about the kid. Alex has never done anything worthwhile before and now here he is, accidentally fucking creating life! It’s a bit exhilarating, if you don’t get caught up in the details. 

That’s why Alex decides he’s just going to enjoy being in the here and now for a while and let the future do whatever the fuck it wants. He’ll have to worry about it eventually, but not right now. Right now, he’s just going to spend every day doing exactly what he wants.

Well… not _exactly_ what he wants. He still has to go to school and stuff, and that’s definitely not how he would choose to spend his days under ideal conditions. Ideal conditions would be like… the beach or something. Somewhere definitely not school, that’s for sure.

But Alex gets it. School is important and he’s got to go for now. It’ll be different once the baby comes and maybe he’ll get his GED at that point and then get a job to support the both of them. Charles and Erik probably wouldn’t like that, seeing as they’re both professors and think education is super important, but once Alex has this baby and goes… wherever he’s going after this, that won’t be as much of a factor.

For now, though, Alex sticks with his plan of dressing in baggy hoodies and sweat pants, which gets him some weird looks in a school as preppy as this one but also keeps him under the radar. He goes through the usual motions apart from that: daydream through English Lit, trudge through Math, and maybe actually do a bit of listening in Science.

It’s not like Alex’s day doesn’t have high points. School is freaking boring for the most part, but lunch with Sean is always okay. Sometimes they talk about things and sometimes they just eat their lunches side by side in chill silence. They don’t always see eye to eye about things (like when Sean decides to wax poetic about fucking Moira, gross!), but it doesn’t honestly matter, because Alex genuinely likes Sean and he’s willing to put up with a lot of shit because of that.

Alex has never been good at making friends (can’t seem to make himself say the right things at the right time), but something’s really clicked with Sean, and Alex is glad for it. Even if they never see each other again after this (and they probably won’t, once Alex has the baby and has to leave), Alex will at least know that he had a real friend once upon a time.

XXXXX

After school, Alex does a lot of browsing for baby things online. Not like he’ll ever be able to afford the fancy cribs or fucking ride-on ponies, but he enjoys looking anyway. He also makes time to play some Warcraft whenever he can, because he knows he’s not going to have the time or money for that once the baby comes.

Every Wednesday after dinner, Erik takes Alex into the office and they have money lessons together. The first lesson starts kind of scary, with Erik holding up one dollar and saying, “This is a dollar,” and Alex nodding along but thinking, what the fuck? But that has to be hazing or something because it gets a lot better after that. Some of the things Erik schools Alex in are high-concept, like mortgages or how the tax system works. Other times, most of the time, it’s a lot more grounded and useful than that.

Like one evening Erik tells him, “Diapers. A regular brand box of diapers costs approximately $25. The smaller the size, the more diapers in the box, but the price remains constant because babies go through less as they increase in size. Newborn boxes have around 120 diapers per box. Newborns go through around 10 diapers every day. So we end up spending $25 dollars every 12 days. That’s nearly $65 per month just for diapers.

“And of course,” he goes on, “that’s just speaking of disposable diapers. Something you’ll find – not just with diapers – is that disposable is always more expensive in the long run than reusable. And there’s a reason for that: convenience. Reusable always requires a considerably greater start-up cost than disposable and always requires greater effort on your part. What you need to decide is, is convenience worth more money to you? Or, put another way, can you afford to not be convenient?

“Take the example of single parenting. You have limited resources in both time and money. So you make the choice: do you want to spend more time and effort (which you don’t have) on reusable diapers or do you want to spend more money (which you also don’t have) on disposable? And it doesn’t end there, because you have to make that same decision over and over again. Do you want to make your own baby food (with time you won’t have) or do you want to buy premade baby food (with money you still won’t have)?”

Alex’s head is spinning but holy crap… he can see it now, how quiet, reserved Erik would be a good teacher.

“So what should I do?” he asks.

Erik shrugs. “My advice? Marry rich.”

XXXXX

It’s not like Alex never thinks about marriage or about baby-daddies. Obviously Erik was kidding (he’s a lot funnier than he seems, Alex knows that by now), but he’s got a point. It would be a lot easier to raise a baby with someone else helping out and also footing half the bill. It’s not a new concept; that’s why people get married after they get knocked up, isn’t it? That way even if they’re not in love, they’re at least not alone.

Not that Alex would ever marry the guy who knocked him up. He wouldn’t marry Todd fucking Blanding, even he was the last asshole on earth. Alex doesn’t ever plan on telling the guy he’s fathered a child. That might seem a little… shady, but Todd only ever considered Alex a convenient place to stick his dick, so Alex is definitely not going to give him the chance to screw up their baby’s life. Or Alex’s.

There are other options, though. Not right now, but maybe someday. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities that Alex will at some point in the future meet a guy he’s totally into who is also into him. Alex doesn’t think of himself as being particularly desirable, but he’s not bad looking (as long as the baby doesn’t ruin that completely), and as long as he watches his mouth, he’s not a terrible person. So maybe someday Alex will find a good guy and they’ll fall in love and then Alex will get the chance to have a real family again. That might be cool.

It couldn’t be just any dumbo, though. They’d have to fucking qualify first. This potential guy would have to prove that he could stick around and be someone’s father, and also not fuck it up too badly. He’d have to prove he’d be okay raising someone else’s kid, too. Alex knows that’s a big thing for some people (the redheaded step-child is a stereotype for a reason and it’s not just because the world hates gingers). Of course Alex lives in a world where almost no one is actually being raised by their real parents, but he also knows that there’s definite favoritism when it comes to biological children in foster families. And that shit just isn’t going to fly in Alex’s hypothetical future. If Alex ever gets married and has a family, it’s going to be with a man who will love this baby as much as any made by his own dick.

If this potential guy happens to be rich, that would also be nice, but Alex isn’t shallow. All he’s asking for is a decent guy who’s good with kids, makes okay money, and also is really fucking hot.

Well, maybe Alex is shallow. But only a little.

XXXXX

One night after dinner, Alex is lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling and letting David feel him up (he’s been sort of fascinated with Alex’s baby-belly lately and if Alex wasn’t so embarrassed about it and also trying to keep it hidden from everyone, he wouldn’t blame the kid). He’s not really paying attention to what anyone else is doing, just minding his own business and daydreaming about chocolate. Not just any chocolate, though: the fucking classy stuff that no one gets except on holidays. It’s the end of November now, which means it’s only a few weeks until Christmas. Alex’s expectations for that aren’t super high – he thinks he’ll probably use his pocket money to buy something small for everyone and probably get the same in return – but he’s also got some idea that there will be really fancy chocolate bars at some point. And that… that would be awesome.

So that’s what Alex is thinking about and that’s why he doesn’t realize at first that something’s happening. Even when he does start to feel something, though, he’s not sure it’s not his imagination. It’s just a tickle, just a light fluttering sensation. It could be David using babyish fingers to try to tickle him, or it could be dry skin starting to tingle. But it’s not either of those things, because Alex realizes it’s fucking coming from inside him. It’s… it’s the goddamn baby moving!

“Holy shit!” he says, and pushes himself back into a sitting position. His hands go to his belly without his permission but of course he can’t feel anything from that side. He can barely feel anything at all, let alone through his fucking skin. But still – fucking cool, right!

Then… oh then, Alex realizes he’s made a scene. His heart starts to pound as he realizes that everyone else in the room is looking at him in concern. He’s suddenly at a loss for words. There’s got to be a way to explain this all without telling the truth, but for the life of him, Alex can’t think of it. He can feel his throat getting tighter and it’s these stupid pregnancy hormones jerking him around and making him make a fool out of himself like this.

He might cry. Oh god. Everyone is going to know his secret in about two seconds, and Alex is definitely going to cry.

“Alex,” Charles starts softly, “are you alright.”

“I’m fine,” Alex manages to say. He bites his lip and hopes the pain will help keep his head on straight. It doesn’t help much.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Charles asks.

He’s been asking that for fucking weeks now and Alex suddenly can’t take it anymore.

“No!” he snaps. “I don’t want to fucking talk about it.”

Charles looks a bit hurt by that, and Alex immediately feels bad, because it’s not Charles’s fault that Alex is in such a bad situation. It’s not Charles’s fault that Alex can’t talk to him about this.

“Well,” Erik says, and he sounds calm but he looks pissed, “you’re going to have to eventually, aren’t you?”

“Erik,” Charles cuts in quickly, “You said you’d let me handle this.”

Erik sniffs like maybe he never made that agreement. Then he says, “And I will. But it needs handled now, Charles, and you know it. I accept the point you’re trying to make about consent, but even you have to admit that letting him make the first move isn’t going to work here.”

Alex looks back and forth between them, because they’re definitely talking about him but what they’re saying doesn’t make any sense.

Charles sighs. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Tough love has its place, I suppose.”

He says, “Ororo, Sean, would you please leave us?”

Ororo and Sean look at Charles and then at Alex and then at each other.

Sean says, “Professor, you never let us hear the good parts!”

“Out!” Erik says, and that at least gets them moving.

Once they’ve gone, Alex feels even more exposed than he did before. Which doesn’t make any sense at all, but what does these days? He grabs David and cuddles him onto his lap. David doesn’t seem to notice the awkwardness around him or if he does he chooses to ignore it, burying his face in Alex’s chest and probably rubbing his runny nose on Alex’s shirt, the little shit. It makes Alex smile even though he can’t quite get his eyes to stop watering.

“I didn’t want it to come to this, you know, Alex,” Charles tells him.

Alex nods along. They’ve obviously put the pieces together. He knows what’s coming next.

“I wanted you to be comfortable coming to us with this problem. I didn’t think there would be any harm in letting you get to that point first before we talked it through. But I may, as Erik says, have miscalculated. If I’ve caused more harm than good, I apologize. This definitely should have happened sooner.”

“Happened sooner?” Alex repeats. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and glares up at them. “What, you kicking me out?”

Erik and Charles both blink at Alex for a moment, then Erik turns to look at Charles with an incredulous look on his face. Charles looks back at him and they have what Alex now recognizes as a silent telepathic conversation.

At last, Erik says, “Alex, don’t be stupid. We’re not kicking you out.”

“Of course not!” Charles agrees. He sounds so fucking earnest about it, but how can he now that he knows the truth? “Alex we’ve talked about this. You belong here. No matter what you’ve done or will do, you’re part of this family. Are… are you not happy here?”

Alex doesn’t know how to answer that.

“I,” he starts. “Yeah. I am, but… the baby!”

_I won’t give it up_ , he thinks hard in Charles’s direction, because that seems easier than having to say it out loud. _You can’t make me give it up._

“No,” Charles agrees with a quickness that’s almost frightening. “Never. Alex, no one’s going to take your child from you. Legally, we couldn’t even if we wanted to.”

“Which we don’t,” Erik cuts in.

“Right,” Charles says quickly. “Which we don’t. We only want you to be healthy and happy, Alex. If you’ve decided you want to keep the child, of course we won’t stand in the way of that.”

“But then I can’t stay,” Alex manages.

“Sure you can,” Erik says. “It’s not that hard. Just don’t go anywhere.”

Alex doesn’t understand. This is not how things work. They can’t know the truth and be okay with it. They can’t be willing to help him with this, not when they’re so fucking perfect in every other way. Alex can’t have done something to deserve this.

“I don’t get it,” he tells them.

Erik says, “It’ll come to you.”

Charles elbows him.

“Alex,” he says, and he’s smiling now and it’s so fucking beautiful and scary that Alex can’t look away. “Don’t leave. Stay. Have the baby and stay. That’s how family works, Alex, and you’re part of this family. Someday, you’re honestly going to understand that. But for now… how about a hug, hmm?”

So Alex lets himself be pulled into a hug, and then he cries.


	12. Chapter 12

So it turns out Erik and Charles have known for kind of a while about Alex’s, uh, predicament. Not the whole time apparently, but for a while. At least as long as Alex has, anyway. But, as Charles explains wretchedly, they were waiting for Alex to trust them enough to come to them with the problem. They didn’t want to take away his right to his own secrets (which Alex would probably appreciate a lot more if the last few weeks weren’t so stressful). Or rather, _Charles_ didn’t want to take away that right. Erik was all for making him talk about it immediately. But he’s not the one with a degree in child psychology, and so he’d gone along with the plan (for a while, anyway) and just tried to intimidate Alex into talking by using his scary glares. 

And maybe this whole thing is kind of on Alex, too. He probably should have just gone to Charles and Erik as soon as he knew the truth. Or at least he should have been paying more attention and realized what they were doing. Because it’s not like they were very subtle about some things; Charles has been letting him practice taking care of David for ages, and almost all of Erik’s money lessons come back to babies eventually. 

But that’s really fucking easy to say in hindsight. It was a lot harder to think through all of that when he was panicking about how much trouble he’s in. He still can’t quite believe that everyone’s taking it so well. If it was only one thing – if Alex _only_ had a destructive power, or _only_ had the pregnancy mutation, or _only_ had a criminal record – maybe Alex would understand Charles and Erik getting over that. But he has all of those things, and it seems like every time he turns around, he’s causing more trouble. He knows intellectually that Charles and Erik (and the kids, too) want him around, but he doesn’t really get why. He’s never really done anything to deserve that. Maybe it’s just one of those things he’s never going to understand, despite what Charles says.

__But then again, maybe it’s not. After all, Alex has no reason to want to keep this baby (it does nothing but cause trouble for him), and yet he doesn’t ever want to give it up._ _

__Maybe that’s just how it works when you’re family._ _

____

XXXXX

Everything isn’t suddenly magically fixed after the big revelation. He’s still got pretty much all the same problems as before except that now maybe he’s got more people in his corner than he thought. But still, Alex doesn’t think this teen mom bullshit is going to be a cakewalk now or anything. That’s why he works hard not to feel so relieved after it all comes out.

It’s hard, though, because even if he doesn’t entirely understand the reasons behind it, he’s still reeling in the fact that he gets to stay here _and_ keep the baby. It’s the two things he wanted most, and now he gets to have them. He wants to not trust it (it’ll hurt less that way when it all gets taken away, a small treacherous part of his brain says), but it’s really, really hard to resist when everyone is acting so normal about it all.

They’re in the playroom the day after Alex’s breakdown to Charles and Erik, and Alex is still kind of dazed about the whole thing (not least the part where he’d cried in Charles’s lap while Erik rubbed his back soothingly for over an hour last night). But he figures it’s only fair that he tells Sean and Ororo what’s going on. 

So he rubs his hands on his pants to get rid of the sweat, takes a steadying breath and says, “So, I’m pregnant.”

Sean doesn’t even look away from his game, that asshole.

“Yeah,” he says. “Duh.”

Alex stares at him. “What the fuck?” he asks. “Did you eavesdrop last night?”

“Nah,” Sean says, totally unconcerned. “You had morning sickness when you first got here, remember? Kind of hard to miss. Also you’ve been watching babies on the bus, you creep.”

Alex says, “Oh.”

He looks at Ororo. “I guess you knew, too, huh?”

She shrugs. “We’re not stupid, Alex,” she tells him.

And okay, she’s not wrong. But Alex isn’t stupid, either, and he still didn’t know. They just have the fucking edge here, because they were obviously both in the house when Charles gave birth (ew) to David, and also when Charles announced he was pregnant again. So of course they would have recognized the signs and thought it was obvious what was going on with Alex.

The problem, Alex thinks, is that everyone here thinks everything is so freaking obvious when actually it really, really isn’t. Like Alex would have ever just jumped to the conclusion that Charles is pregnant. Probably he would have noticed something eventually once he stopped being in crisis mode all the time, but it’s not like anyone was helping him out by explaining shit. It’s like that thing that Charles said once, that he always thinks everyone else knows all the things he does. Maybe everyone is like that a little bit, telepath or not.

Alex says, “You guys suck.”

Ororo says, “Alex, when your baby starts to kick, can I feel it?”

Alex thinks about holding a grudge, but she’s looking at him with big hopeful eyes, and he just can’t.

“Yeah,” he says, “But only if you get me something really good for Christmas.”

XXXXX

A few days later on Charles’s early class day, he calls Alex into the office after homework. Alex goes, a little bit nervous, but it’s not like he has any other deep, dark secrets anywhere, so he’s really got nothing to be afraid of. So he goes in and sits down in the chair opposite. His feet hurt and his back hurts and his shoulders hurt, so he’s glad there’s no repeat of that time when Charles made him just stand there for twenty minutes while he deliberated.

Charles says, “I know Erik has been talking to you about money, but I can’t let him get away with being more helpful than I am, so I thought I’d make myself useful.”

Alex hesitates, because he remembers what Erik told him about Charles and money.

“I, uh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Professor. Erik’s really got the money angle covered, you know?”

“As well he should,” Charles says amiably, not at all offended even though he has to be hearing Alex’s disparaging thoughts. “But there are other matters we can discuss. Have you made a list of things you’re going to need for the baby?”

It’s still honestly a little startling to hear anyone refer to Alex’s baby out loud. Maybe that’s why Alex is more truthful than he’d be under other circumstances.

“Well, yeah,” he says slowly. “But I can’t really afford-”

“Let’s see it, then,” Charles prompts.

“It’s not really written down,” Alex hedges.

Charles pushes a pen and piece of paper across the desk and gives Alex a pointed look.

Alex sighs.

Alex’s list when put on paper seems even more pathetic than it had in his head.

Charles, at least, has the decency to pretend not to notice. He nods at the list thoughtfully and says, “We can work with this.”

“There’s nothing to work with,” Alex tells him, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to pretend he’s not letting them rest on his belly a bit.

Charles gives him a look. “That’s inexperience talking,” he says. The words are kind of offensive but his voice is still so fucking nice. “You’re forgetting about two things. First, hand-me-downs. We’ve got plenty of baby things around here that you can make use of completely without cost.”

“But what about your baby? Won’t she need all the hand-me-downs?”

“Some, yes,” Charles agrees. “But I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but David has an astounding amount of stuff. He’s got plenty to spare. And apart from that, there’s Kurt, who’s also outgrowing things at an alarming rate. But between the two of us, Raven and I will definitely be able to spare quite a lot of baby paraphernalia for your little one. Even if the children have to take turns at things, we’ll be able to manage for most of the clothes and equipment.

“And that brings me to my second point, which is that as this is your first baby, we really ought to have a baby shower.”

“A baby shower?” Alex repeats slowly. He’s got this idea in his head of a bunch of pregnant ladies eating cakes and playing baby bingo. That does not at all seem like something Alex would be interested in doing.

“Yes,” Charles says. “A baby shower. An excuse for all your family and friends to buy you cute baby things and – yes, I know what you’re thinking – to eat cake and play games.”

“Cake could be good,” Alex says slowly. Maybe they could skip the games. “But… I don’t have any friends.”

He would add that he doesn’t have any family, either, but he’s starting to think that might not be true.

“We’ll wrangle something together,” Charles assures him. “You’ll have to start a list first. A registry. Just a dozen or so things that you need or want for the child. Don’t worry about costs – these are gifts for the baby. Leave off clothes unless there’s a special outfit you want. We can also go through all of Kurt’s and David’s old things one of these days to figure out what we’re able to reuse. That way there will be more room on your list for things you actually need.”

Alex’s throat feels unreasonably tight.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he manages.

Charles says, “Well, a nice foot massage would never go amiss.”

XXXXX

There’s a lot of relief on Alex’s part after that. He feels, for the very first time, like he might not be in this alone. Like there’s hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. He even starts to be able to sleep at night again, which is fucking awesome. But even for all the extra help, pregnancy is still really fucking scary sometimes.

Charles’s doctor finally comes back into town in mid-December, so Charles lets Alex skip school one day and takes them both to a non-descript building downtown. Alex gets the story on the drive there. Charles tells him that this is a privately-owned mutant clinic that mostly gets its funding from wealthy anonymous benefactors. It mostly attracts people who can’t go to other doctors for fear of being discriminated against. Charles and Erik and their family usually go to a regular doctor since they all look pretty well normal (except for Ororo’s hair, but even that’s not really weird enough to make people stare). Raven does bring Kurt here, though, because she’d started off going to a regular OBGYN but had run into trouble after the ultrasound had shown there might be a tail involved.

Alex is sort of nervous to go inside after that. He’s never been around that many other mutants before, and he doesn’t quite know what to expect. There are only a few people in the waiting room, at least, and most of them look fairly normal. It’s true, there’s one guy with a set of wings tucked up against his back and another with tattoos all over her face, but almost everyone else just looks normal. Alex looks at them all and wonders what it is about them that has them too afraid to go to a regular doctor. Is there something inside of them that’s odd, or maybe under their clothes? Any one of them could be a hiding a tail or a pair of antennae or something.

Alex and Charles don’t draw much notice when they come in, probably because they look so normal. Neither one of them is far enough along to be obviously pregnant, which means they both just seem kind of fat. Charles signs them in and then they find seats to wait.

As he’s filling out medical history paperwork stuff, Alex says, “So are we going separate, or what?”

He doesn’t want to say it, but he really doesn’t want to go back there alone. He’s never done this before, and he really wants someone back there he trusts. He doesn’t want to have to say that, though.

Charles look at him closely, so Alex tries to play it cool. 

Charles says, “I’d not intended it. You’re a minor and I’m your legal guardian, so I had planned on going back with you. But if you’re not comfortable with that-”

“If you insist,” Alex cuts in. 

Charles looks at him, bites his lip, and then smiles. “I really do,” he says.

Alex very quietly breathes a sigh of relief.

When they call his name a while later, Charles comes back with him. He politely turns around when Alex has to change into one of those paper hospital gowns. A nurse comes in after that and takes his temperature and his blood pressure (which are both fine, apparently). When she goes to mark them down on his chart, though, she catches sight of something that surprises her.

“You’re sixteen?” she asks.

Alex looks at his feet, because he knows why she’s asking. 

“Almost seventeen,” he says quietly. 

She makes a hmmm sound, and goes back to his chart. Alex glares at the back of her head and wishes he could just say fuck this whole thing and put his damn pants back on.

_Think of the baby, Alex_ , Charles says in his head, and Alex glares at him, too. He’s right, though, so Alex just crosses his arms over his belly and tries to ignore it.

That’s not the only judging he gets, either. The nurse takes him to a different room after that to weigh him (and why they couldn’t do that while he still had his clothes on, he doesn’t fucking get). In this skimpy gown, he definitely looks like the pregnant sixteen-year-old he is, so everyone he passes in the hall gives him a double-take.

Alex doesn’t look at the scale when they weigh him because he just doesn’t want to know. He’s got enough to worry about without adding the exact number of gained pounds to his nightmares. It’s bad enough he’s got fucking _boobs_ now (and okay, they’re barely there, but what the fuck, body?!).

After that, Alex has to pee in a cup to see if he’s going to get diabetes (ugh, he didn’t even know that was a possibility), and then they take his blood. Then finally the nurse leads him back to the room where Charles is still waiting.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

Alex says, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

And maybe he’s not quite fine, but seeing Charles there waiting for him makes him feel a bit better about the whole thing. Alex isn’t the only one going through this, at least. He’s not alone. That counts for more than he would have ever thought possible before.

Charles says, “Okay,” and that’s that.

The doctor comes in a few minutes later and introduces herself, but Alex isn’t really paying attention. She’s brisk, no-nonsense, and looks like she gives exactly zero fucks. Which is good, because at least it means she doesn’t have time to give Alex judging looks like everyone else in this damn place.

She says, “First thing’s first. On your back.”

Alex awkwardly lies back the table and, when she gives him a pointed look, puts his feet up into the stirrups. He doesn’t know what the fucking point is – it’s not like he’s got anything down there she can look at.

Except, apparently he does. The doctor snaps her gloves on, then puts her hand right up his gown and starts feeling his junk.

“Whoa!” Alex says, because this is the closest any lady’s hand has ever been to his balls and he’s not sure he likes it.

“Relax,” she tells him, and that would be a lot freaking easier if her fingers weren’t feeling up behind his balls. “There it is.”

Alex says, “What?”

“Birth opening,” she says, and pushes hard on a spot that makes Alex’s eyes water.

Alex says, “What?!”

“We’ll talk about that in a minute,” she tells him. Her hands move away from his junk, then, but she still keeps feeling him up.

“Feeling any movement yet?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Alex says. “A bit.”

“Good,” she says. “How about morning sickness? You eating alright?”

“Not much morning sickness anymore,” Alex tells her. “I eat fine.”

“Good, good. You taking prenatals?”

“Folic acid and iron,” he tells her.

“Excellent,” she says.

Her hands move up to chest, and he looks away. It was bad enough when she was grabbing his boy parts; he can’t take the shame of her touching his girl parts, too.

At last she moves back and strips her gloves off.

“Two things,” she tells him as she washes her hands. “First thing, I want you on birth control after this. Obviously your options are extremely limited because of your unique anatomy, but that means you’re going to have to be even more careful than you normally would. That means condoms. Every single time you have sex. You hear me?”

Alex glares and says, “I hear you.”

She ignores his tone, and says, “Almost twenty percent of teen moms get pregnant again before they’re twenty. Obviously this time you didn’t know it could happen, but you know better now. Condoms every time.”

She dries her hands and moves over to the computer at the table. “Second thing,” she says. “The birth process. With women it’s fairly straight-forward, but this is more complicated.”

She does some clicking and pulls up a diagram of a guy’s spread legs and the stuff in between. She points to the spot right behind the balls, the spot where she’d been touching Alex just a few minutes ago.

“This is where the birth opening forms,” she tells him. “This is where the baby comes out.”

Alex… honestly thinks he might be sick. He lets his head hang down and struggles to breath normally. He jerks when he feels a touch on his shoulder, but he knows those hands and it’s only Charles coming up behind him.

“You’re alright, Alex,” he says quietly, squeezing Alex’s shoulder. “It’s not as bad as all that.”

“If it makes you feel better,” the doctor says, “by that point in the pregnancy, you’ll be so glad to be done that it won’t even phase you anymore how the kid is going to come out.”

Oddly enough, that does sort of make him feel better, and he’s able to get himself together enough after that to power through the rest of the discussion.

The only thing left after that is the part that Alex has been waiting for this whole time. He and Charles go into a different room and Alex has to get his fat ass up onto another table. A different nurse guy comes in and lubes Alex up, and then Alex holds his breath as the guy pushes the stick-thing down on his belly.

And there he is, Alex’s baby in grainy black and white. It looks like nothing more than a bunch of blurry shapes, but the guy say, “It’s a boy.”

A boy. Holy shit, it’s a boy. A little perfect baby boy, and he’s inside Alex right now just.. sleeping or something.

Alex may or may not cry. He won’t admit to it later. Stupid hormones.

He wipes at his eyes with one hand and with the other reaches over to grab Charles’s fingers. He squeezes and Charles squeezes back.

The nurse guy says, “Want a picture printed?”

Alex sniffs and nods. This is definitely something for the award board.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just some holiday fluff

Christmas rolls around right on schedule. Well, first there’s Hanukkah, because apparently Erik is Jewish. 

“Hanukkah?” Alex asks. “What the hell is Hanukkah?” 

He’s heard of it, but he’s not totally sure he knows what it is. Something to do with that Jewish trident-thing, right?

“A time-honored tradition for the Hebrew people,” Sean quips.

Alex forces himself to keep a straight face, mostly because Charles is giving them a stern look.

Later, though, once Erik brings out the trident-thing (“hanukkiah”) his face is serious and kind of wistful in a way Alex has never seen it before. This is important to him, Alex realizes, and he would have to be a dick to make fun of that.

Alex gets the story eventually from Ororo, of all people. Apparently it goes like this:

There was once a group of Jews living in Israel who got conquered by the Greeks, and the Greeks decided the Jews had to worship Zeus or whatever, and destroyed their Jewish temple. The Jews were understandably pissed off, so they went to war about it. Once they’d driven the Greeks off, they came back to their destroyed temple and decided to clean it up. They only had enough lamp oil for one night but the oil got miracled into lasting for eight nights instead.

Or something like that.

So that’s why two weeks before Christmas, they put the hanukkiah in the window and light one of the candles. Then the next they come back and light two of the candles. Then the next night it’s three. And so on, for eight days. They get to take turns lighting them while Erik says a prayer in another language (Yiddish, maybe, or Hebrew, Alex doesn’t know).

Alex, who has never done anything like this before, expects to feel kind of dumb lighting some candles every night. But he doesn’t, and it’s got nothing to do with his distant admiration for some ancient Jews standing up for what they believe in (though obviously that’s a nice thought, and more power to them). The thing is, though, when they’re all gathered around the window in the dark with everyone’s faces lit up by candlelight and Erik’s deep voice washing over them, it just feels… sort of special. Alex feels like something more than himself, and he doesn’t hate that feeling.

About halfway through the week on one of the days Erik’s working later, Alex says, “You guys don’t really seem all that religious, you know?”

Charles sort of laughs.

“No, we wouldn’t. But Erik’s mother was. His parents came over from Germany when he was a little boy, and they brought their traditions with them. But of course they both died before he was a teenager. He doesn’t have much left of them, but he has this. I think a small part of him feels some connection to the Hebrew cause, but mostly he just wants to feel close to his mother.”

Alex takes this in. He doesn’t have anything like that from his parents. He doesn’t have much at all he could show this baby inside him about its grandparents. He doesn’t know how to feel about that, not really. Maybe the emptiness of it will hit him later. Maybe when it does, he’ll get the courage up to ask Erik about the whole thing.

“He was in the system?” he asks to distract himself. He’s heard this story before, sort of, in bits and pieces.

“From the time he was eleven,” Charles confirms. “He was a lot like you, you know. They told him he was trouble and he believed them.”

“What did he do?”

“Quite a lot of property damage, actually. Moved a lot from place to place. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect. But then when he was seventeen… he met me.”

“And you saved him,” Alex says.

“No,” Charles says. “He saved himself. I was just there to hold his hand.”

Alex thinks about this.

He doesn’t know if he’s been _saved_ exactly, but he’s definitely in a better spot now than he was just a few months ago. There also wasn’t really any hand-holding involved. More like Charles and Erik have been taking turns holding Alex by the scruff of his neck mama-cat style.

“Is he going to be mad you told me all this?”

Charles looks surprised. “No, of course not,” he says. “He doesn’t talk about it, but that doesn’t mean he wants it forgotten. Erik of all people knows how important it is to remember where you come from. That’s the reason he honors the Jewish holy days.”

“I don’t know where I come from,” Alex admits.

Charles says, “There’s still time to find out.”

And that’s how Alex decides he wants a life book, after all.

XXXXX

Between the end of Hanukkah and Christmas Eve there are a couple of days cool-down period, which is good, because Alex needs time to recover from all the jelly donuts he’s been eating (fuck your judging eyebrows, Sean, he’s eating for two, okay?).

The break also gives Alex time to finish up (read: start) his Christmas shopping. Luckily, Sean also has yet to start his, so they take Ro and go to the shopping center after school one day. Alex honestly doesn’t know what to get anyone, so he just wanders around the stores, hoping for a brilliant idea. He finds a cool-looking cloud pillow he thinks will look nice in Ro’s room, so he gets that for her. For Sean, he figures a nice new pair of headphones will do. David probably won’t even notice if he doesn’t get a present from Alex, but Alex finds a cute plush vegetable set he’ll probably enjoy playing with.

Charles and Erik are nowhere near as easy to shop for as that. For one thing, Alex owes them a lot more and wants to show them that. But also, they don’t really have hobbies or interests the way the kids do. Well, they probably do, but most of their time is definitely spent doing parent-y or work things, so Alex hasn’t seen as much of it. Erik, Alex knows, likes to read, but Alex doesn’t know what type of book he’d be interested in, so it’s not like he can pick something out for him. And Charles… what the fuck does Charles even like? DNA? Flirting with Erik? Having sex with Erik?

Actually… that last one gives Alex an idea. But first, he’ll need to get Sean and Ororo on board.

XXXXX

Alex wakes up Christmas morning to Sean pounding on his door saying, “Presents presents presents presents!”

Alex groans and pulls his pillow over his head. He is way too pregnant to be dealing with this crack-of-dawn bullshit.

Charles tells him gently, _You’d better get up and come down here. There might be a riot if we ask the little ones to wait any longer._

Alex says, _Start without me!_. He knows he’ll be sorry if he misses it, though, so he pushes himself up and takes his fat ass downstairs.

The first thing he notices downstairs is the smell of coffee and he briefly considers getting a cup for himself. He knows by now, though, that coffee smells a lot better than it tastes, and anyway, the acid reflux later won’t be worth the extra energy. He’ll just have to find a cup of Charles’s tea and make do with that.

Charles and the kids are gathered around the high-quality plastic Christmas tree they put up last week. Sean, Alex can see, is practically foaming at the mouth looking at the presents laid under it. Alex doesn’t know what the big deal is until he realizes exactly how many presents are under there.

“Holy crap!” he says, looking around with wide eyes. When he’d gone to bed last night there had been a few things (mostly the presents from Sean, Alex, and Ororo to one another), but now… well, Alex doesn’t think he’s ever seen this many presents all together.

Erik comes in then from the kitchen, a silver serving tray floating along behind him carrying three mugs, two glasses of chocolate milk and a sippy cup.

“Oh look,” Erik says flatly, “the Christmas Man has brought you presents to Christianize your pagan holiday. How fortunate. Do you want to open them now or after breakfast?”

Ororo immediately says, “Now!” and Sean nods his head quickly.

Alex definitely agrees now that he’s seen the presents, but he tries to play it cool, anyway.

“Whatever,” he says easily, and takes the mug of tea Erik hands him.

Apparently they’re supposed to just jump right into the fray, if the way Sean and Ororo act is any indication. They’re both down on their knees the second after Charles gives them the go-ahead, digging through the gifts for ones with their names on the label. Alex has a slightly slower start because it’s not as easy as it used to be to get down on his knees, but once he’s down he does his best to keep up.

Presents, he thinks as he opens the first one, are fucking awesome! He can’t remember the last time he got so many gifts. Probably he never has. The place he was at this time last year had a lot of kids and they were pretty rigid about what you could and couldn’t do. Not that they hadn’t gotten the kids stuff for Christmas, but the presents had all been clothes. Alex had understood; sometimes the money just wasn’t there for anything frivolous (what he _hadn’t_ been so understanding about was them not letting him take the clothes he’d gotten with him when he moved onto the next place, but if he thinks about that he’s going to get all pissed off and that’s not what he wants for this Christmas). The year before that, he’d been in the boy’s home, and everyone had gotten the same present: a Hershey’s chocolate bar, a glow-in-the-dark water bottle, and an assorted coloring/activity book.

All that pretty much means that Erik and Charles could get Alex literally anything personalized and he’d be happy with it. He’s not going to say that out loud, though, because Erik’s an asshole and would probably call his bluff by taking all the presents but one back until Alex caves and admits he’s just as materialistic as everyone else. And he is, he can admit that. Alex enjoys opening presents and he doesn’t think that makes him a bad person.

Alex’s presents from Charles and Erik include: 

• A belly band (for when his belly gets bigger and holy crap he doesn't even want to think about that - he's already fucking huge!)  
• Actual men's maternity jeans and shirts (what the hell, why is that a thing?)  
• A nursing bra (Alex’s tits are already swelling and probably a little support would help with that, no matter how much he doesn’t want to think about it)  
• A huge teardrop shaped pillow (“pregnancy pillow”, Charles explains, and it's unlike any body-pillow Alex has ever seen but sleeping is already getting uncomfortable so he hopes this one is up to snuff)  
• Some cocoa butter (for his skin, apparently)

It’s not all pregnancy stuff, though. There are also some presents that are just for Alex:

• A six-month Warcraft membership (which will see him through the rest of the pregnancy and give him something to do while he waits to have this kid)  
• A ton of books, including _Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded_ ; _The Year Without Summer_ ; _Island on Fire_ ; and _Eruption! Volcanoes and the Science of Saving Lives_

Alex looks up at Charles and Erik after he’s opened the last present.

“Thank you,” he says, and he’s embarrassed to find he’s getting a bit teary-eyed. It’s just… this is the nicest Christmas he’s ever had and he doesn’t quite know how to handle that. He doesn’t _need_ these things, would survive without them, but they’re all going to be really fucking nice to own. He knew it would be this way, knew Charles and Erik wouldn’t let him down, but he didn’t know how hard it would hit him. Charles and Erik really fucking care about him, and Alex still doesn’t know what to do with that.

“One more thing,” Charles tells him, and Erik tosses something his way. 

Alex catches it on instinct and looks down at the light-brown wrapper.

“Oh my god,” he says, eyes going wide. It’s chocolate. Fucking high-class artisan chocolate. “I think I love you.”

Charles beams, Erik smirks, and Sean and Ororo are righteously envious. All is right with the world.

XXXXX

After the kids have all opened the presents from Charles and Erik, they finish the exchange with everything else. Sean gets Ororo a gift card for Sephora, and he gets Alex some baby belly paint (and also a jar of pickles because he’s an asshole like that). Ororo gets Sean a book about echolocation in different bat species, and she gets Alex a nice picture frame for his ultrasound prints. David, of course, just gets a bunch of different toys, and he seems very pleased with that.

When it comes time to give Charles and Erik their presents, Alex says, “I hope you guys don’t mind we all went together in for yours.”

Charles says, “I’m sure we’ll appreciate whatever you’ve chosen.”

Erik say, “That depends. What is it?”

“Well,” Alex says, suddenly nervous. He hopes this wasn’t a mistake. He really, really wants them to like it.

“Here,” Sean cuts in, grabbing the card from under the tree.

They all hold their breath as Charles opens it.

“Oh,” he says, reading the words inside. He looks up at them, eyebrows raised. “Date night?”

“Date night?” Erik repeats, looking over his shoulder at the card.

“Date night,” Alex agrees. “Raven said that was a nice restaurant so we got a gift card, and we, uh, arranged to go over and spend the night at Raven’s place whenever you want to use it.”

“So you can have sex!” Sean puts in cheerfully.

“Do you like it?” Ororo asks hopefully.

“Yes, of course,” Charles says at once. “Thank you, my darlings.”

There’s hugs all around then, and Alex feels distinctly pleased with himself. He thinks Charles would have said he liked it even if that wasn’t the truth, but he’d looked genuinely happy about it. Erik, too, had seemed pleased.

Making them happy (and okay, making Ororo and Sean and even David happy, too) makes Alex happy, and that’s sort of a novel feeling for him. He’s setting down roots, there’s absolutely no doubt about that now. A few months ago, that definitely would have scared him off, made him want to run. But right now, he can’t think of anywhere at all he’d rather be.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> long chapter :)

Alex uses the post-holiday lull to get a few things done. First, he takes Charles up on his offer to go through David and Kurt’s hand-me-downs for things Alex might be able to use for his baby. He’s mindful of the fact that Charles also has to make use of these hand-me-downs, but there are at least a few things that Charles and Raven have managed to get multiples of. Raven has an old baby sling she’d picked out special that Kurt had ended up hating, so she tells Alex he can give it a shot. She’s also got a breastfeeding pillow she’s not using anymore; Kurt’s six months now – still breastfeeding but only barely. 

It’s hot and sweaty work, pulling mountains of baby stuff out of closets and storage bins, but the process reassures Alex that there are indeed enough clothes, bottles, and baby blankets to go around. He’d felt sort of guilty about it before he realized how much extra stuff these guys have, but now he knows the truth: Charles and Raven have a shopping problem for sure. 

After the hand-me-downs have been sorted into piles (some to be sent to Raven’s for Kurt, some to go to Charles’s for the new babies, and a third pile of things that Alex can put in his closet with his baby-stuff collection), Raven invites the two of them out for mimosas. Then she really looks at them (two preggos, one of them underage) and says, “Actually, milkshakes sound pretty good, too.”

Alex can get on board with that.

XXXXX

January is a mess of being fat, having heartburn and having to pee every two hours. Apart from all that, nothing really changes. Alex still goes to school (he’s put his baggy-hoodie plan into action and he’s invisible enough that no one seems to notice anything odd). He comes home, does his homework, and soaks his feet in hot water while he plays Warcraft.

A part of Alex feels like his body isn’t really his own anymore. He’s about six months pregnant, and the baby seems to be pretty well taking over. His skin starts itch all the time (the cocoa butter from Christmas is a godsend), his balance is completely fucked, and he has to buy a bigger size shoe because his feet just weren’t having the old ones.

The kicking only gets worse, too. On the one hand, that’s actually really reassuring (Alex won’t admit to nightmares about the baby not moving anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen). On the other hand, though, it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world. Plus he’s got to put up with Sean and Ororo feeling him up all the time. Charles always handles the surprise gropes with fucking grace, but he’s probably had a lot of practice with that. 

The whole thing still makes Alex uneasy sometimes, being touched so much. He’s noticed, though, that the more it happens, the less it feels weird. Sometimes he’s even cool enough with the whole thing to put on a show. He, Sean and Ororo play the flashlight peek-a-boo game Charles introduced them to a while back, and that’s always a good time.  
They also take turns introducing the baby to their favorite music.

Unfortunately, this last game forces Alex to admit something he’s been trying really hard to ignore this whole time: neither Ororo nor Sean have any goddamn taste in music.

XXXXX

One day Alex comes home to find a huge metal shed in the backyard. He’s pretty confused about it but he’s not especially concerned until Erik calls them all outside.

“Training,” Erik says in answer to Alex’s raised eyebrows.

He gestures Sean and Ororo over toward the garden, but when Alex to follow them, Charles says, “With me, Alex.”

“We were pondering how we might accommodate for your power,” Charles says, ushering Alex into the shed. “We haven’t been doing as much practice lately because we just weren’t sure what the safest practice ground would be. Then Erik had this brilliant idea last night. The walls are well-reinforced. Even you shouldn’t be able to cut through them.”

Inside the shed, there are a handful of targets. Alex looks from them to Charles.

“You can’t be serious. You want me to use my power _on purpose_?” he asks. “I can’t. Bad things happen when I do this. You know that.”

Charles says, “Alex, if you can’t control this, it’s going to control you. Stressful situations will continue to be unsafe until you find your focus, and trust me, Alex, there’s a great deal of stress in your near future.”

Labor, he means, but Alex can’t think about that right now.

“Fine,” he says. “But if I’m going to do this, you have to stand back.”

And that’s the story of how Alex ends up setting the backyard on fire.

XXXXX

Alex’s second practice session in the big metal shed goes better than the first, but only because Erik added more reinforcement to the walls. They also get Ororo on standby to cause a downpour if needed. Thankfully, it ends up not being necessary.

They keep practicing after that. Every day after his homework is done, Alex spends an hour or two outside trying to hit a target. He never really gets any better at that part of it, but the more he uses his power, the less it scares him. He’d never admit out loud to having been scared of his own damn ability, but the truth is, it’s never brought him anything but trouble before. Now, though, when he gets worked up or irritated, he can walk into a safe place and let off some steam. It makes him feel calmer, more like he’s in control of his abilities, and that’s something he desperately needs when everything else about his body is out of control. After a few weeks, he thinks he might even be able to push a ten pound baby out a hold behind his balls without accidentally killing anybody. Not to say labor is going to end up being easy, but at least no one’s going to die, either.

Actually, Alex had been a little worried that too much practice with his abilities might hurt the baby. After all, the rings do come from about the same place that the little guy is hanging out in there. But the kid keeps kicking and punching Alex from the inside, and the doctor and Charles both agree that he seems fine. Probably Alex is just worrying for worry’s sake.

But either way, all the practice gives Alex an outlet. Even though he’s pregnant and cranky, he’s way less likely to snap angrily at someone when they annoy him. And that’s a good thing, because Alex might be an asshole, but he doesn’t like to see anybody get hurt, even if it’s only their feelings.

That’s why he feels so bad about what happens with Sean. 

It starts like this:

Ororo is walking Alex through the process of making a life book. Alex has a decent number of pictures of his parents and his childhood (though not as many as he’d like, obviously), but they’re not in any particular order and they only really having meaning to him. That’s always been fine, because Alex was always alone before. No one else ever gave enough of a fuck to ask where he’d come from, what he’d been through.

Now, though, Alex is very definitively not alone. He’s got a family now (or something close enough to it), and he’s got a real live baby growing inside him – a baby that belongs to Alex in a way no one else ever has. And Alex knows he’s going to want to share stuff with this kid, and with the rest of the family, if they ask. So that means he’s got to put his memories into some kind of order that makes sense.

So Ororo walks him through it. It’s not enough to document your parents and your birth, she tells him. You have to put the bad things in with the good things (here she looks over at Charles, who nods encouragingly). You have to put in all your foster placements because those places made you who you are today and you don’t want to forget where you’ve been, even if it wasn’t fun at the time.

Easier said than done, though. Alex has spent a good part of his life trying not to think about where he’s been. It’s not as simple as just doing a line drawing of each placement and pasting it into a scrapbook. First he’s got to put them in order in his head.

Alex has had seven placements. Eight, counting this one. The first placement was a short-term foster family. He was only there a few months and he walked around most of the time in a fucking daze because he was eleven and his parents were dead. The placement after that had lasted longer – long enough for Alex to think this was just life now and those people were his family. But then after three years, his powers had manifested and he’d done some (honestly completely accidental) property damage.

After that no one had wanted him. He’d had to wait in Moira’s office for hours as she kept an eye on him and tried to find someone to take him. The people she’d finally found didn’t have any other kids, and Alex had never been so alone before. They were also extremely strict, which was apparently what they had to be to take in a dangerous kid like Alex.

Alex hadn’t really had time to settle into that placement. He was only there a few months before they decided he’d never live up to their expectations and sent him away. The place after that had been the one where the bio-girl had trashed her parents’ room and blamed Alex. Those parents had been strict, too, and he thinks maybe that was her only outlet. He still blames her for it, but he gets it now, how important it is to have somewhere for all your anger to go.

Moira hadn’t been able to find someone to take him that time, so he’d ended up in the boys’ group home for a year. The kids there, at least, were mostly like Alex: troubled kids, dangerous kids. Alex didn’t exactly make any friends, but at least he’d known there were other people like him out there. Well, not exactly like him. No matter how dangerous any of those other boys were, none of them had Alex’s potential for destruction. 

After a year of good behavior (well, relatively) in the group home, Moira had found him another placement. He’d thought then that nothing could be worse than the rigidness of group home, but if he’d known how the next placement was going to turn out, he might have asked to stay instead. At the next placement, Alex’s sixth, there were a lot of kids, and some of them were younger but Alex wasn’t allowed to go near them. There were a lot of things Alex wasn’t allowed to do there. He couldn’t go outside without asking, or go into the kitchen when no one was watching, or use someone else’s soap when his ran out, because that was stealing. They already knew Alex was a bad kid, and they wanted to make he sure he knew it, too.

Alex had lasted a year that place, though he’s not sure how, looking back. What finally brought it to an end was Alex deciding, fuck it, if they were going to treat him like a criminal, he’d show them some fucking law-breaking. It was the first time he’d ever used his powers on purpose, and the owners of the shops he’d targeted (after hours, though, that had to count for something) were really fucking pissed. Which is how Alex became a kid with a record. They’d give him months of community service and shipped him off to the next place, the Blandings.

How Alex is going to put any of that crap down on paper is beyond him. Charles has suggestions, things he must have gotten from the foster-parenting websites Alex knows he browses. He says things like, “How about a family tree for your birth family?” or “Don’t forget to label everything. What’s clear now might not be later.”  
Erik is much more useless. Ororo tells Alex she thinks reds and yellows would look nice on a certain page, but she hands him three different shades of reds and Alex doesn’t know which would work. He holds them up for the group at large to help him out, but Erik just frowns at him and doesn’t say anything. 

Alex says, “What?” but then he remembers that Erik isn’t wearing his glasses and without them his colors are all messed up. So to get out of a bad situation, Alex says, “Sean, what do you think?”

Sean says, “I don’t care, Alex. Do whatever you want,” in a mean voice that has Alex and Ororo staring at him.

“Oh dear,” Charles says. “Ororo, Alex, would you mind giving us some space?”

And that’s how Alex finds out what it’s like to get sent out of the room so the parents can have a serious talk with someone else. It’s a novel experience for him, and he’s not sure he likes it. Then again, he hadn’t exactly enjoyed being the one in the hotspot, either. He just vastly prefers it when no one is having a meltdown at all.

He never does get the story behind it all (though probably it’s got something to do with the way Erik takes Sean for a home visit every few weekends). He and Ororo just take David and go downstairs to play Uno until it’s safe to come back, and neither of them ever asks what’s going on. Alex thinks he really must have messed up asking Sean about the life book. He’s never seen Sean’s life book. Whatever happened to Sean at the place before this, it must have been pretty bad, because Sean never talks about it. Probably he’s trying to forget it.

Alex could tell him it doesn’t work like that. He would know, he’s tried hard enough to forget some of the things that have happened to him. But they’re always there, shaping what you do and how you act. That’s the whole point of the life book: figuring out who you are by remembering where you came from.

But he can’t say that, any of that, to Sean. All he can really do is wait until the coast is clear and then bring the Uno cards upstairs so they can all play together. The next time they work on life books, they’ll make sure Sean isn’t around for it.

XXXXX

The dreaded baby shower finally rolls around in February. Alex isn’t exactly looking forward to being the center of attention in this way, and he doesn’t think the stupid games are going to improve the experience, but it all ends up not being that bad.

Probably that’s because of the people who come. Alex still doesn’t really have any friends (he’s got acquaintances, people he chats with in class when he’s in the mood, but no one he trusts enough to confess about the baby to) so it’s mostly family. Charles, Erik, Ororo, Sean and David are all there, of course, and so are Raven, Azazel, and Kurt. There are also a few other adults Alex has only met in passing: Erik’s friends Emma and Janos, Charles’s friend Lilandra. Moira also comes, which is bit surprising considering how mad she was at him when Charles and Erik had forced Alex to tell her the truth about the baby a while back.

The games aren’t as bad as Alex had been fearing, either. Apparently Charles got Sean and Ororo’s input when he was putting the whole thing together, and they talked him out of anything too embarrassing. Instead it’s mostly just a bunch of stations where people can make keep-sake things for the kid. There’s a onesie decorating station with a bunch of plain white onesies and paint markers (Ororo spends a lot of time there, while Sean contents himself with one really awesome onesie with swearwords written on it). There’s also a place to decorate wooden blocks with letters or little drawings, which is pretty cool. Then there’s a place for people to suggest baby names, and Alex is really actually glad to see it, because he hasn’t done much thinking about what he’s going to call the kid. 

The only proper game they actually have is bowling with giant baby bottles, and Alex isn’t too mad about it since it ends up being pretty fun. Raven is some kind of bowling master, it turns out, so Alex grabs her as a partner and they trounce everyone else.

After that, there’s cake and ice cream, and then Alex gets to open presents. He’s still not entirely comfortable with the idea of sitting in front of everyone and opening things they bought him (that he never would have been able to afford on his own), but Charles reminds him beforehand that giving gifts makes people feel good (he remembers how he himself had felt at Christmas, not because of the stuff he got but because of the stuff he’d given out). So he goes along with it.

He ends up getting everything on his list and then some. Ororo and Sean had gone together to get Alex a cool-looking diaper bag. He’d been a little nervous about carrying around some stupid animal print monstrosity, but this bag looks pretty much like a backpack except with a pouch for holding cold things. 

When he thanks them, Sean says, “We wanted to put some frozen Maxi pads in there – you know for after you pop the kid out. But the Professor wouldn’t let us. But I remember him using them a lot, so…”

Charles says, “Thank you, Sean,” wryly, and everyone laughs.

Moira brings a changing pad – one of those fluffy pillow kind that you can stick on top of a dresser. She gives him a look that says she’s still not happy about this situation, but she’s not going to hold it against the kid, either. Which is nice. Alex would tell her that the best gift she ever gave him was putting him in this placement, but that would be stupid sappy, and he’s not quite pregnant enough for that bullshit yet.

Emma gives Alex a fancy-ass baby monitor that has an app you can put on your phone to actually watch the kid sleep. It seems super expensive and he feels bad for it until he notices how fancy her jewelry is and how rich she must be (and okay, he doesn’t exactly notice it on his own – he gets a telepathic hint from Charles – but that’s not the point).

Raven provides the baby swing, and promises that Alex can have Kurt’s high chair after he’s done with it. The timing should work out, because apparently you don’t need one of those right away anyhow. Janos gives Alex a diaper pail and a few cool-looking pacifiers.

Actually, pretty much everyone gives him pacifiers along with their other gifts, and a few people give him stuffed animals, too. Sean found a little stuffed bat from somewhere that’s particularly cute.

That just leaves Charles and Erik’s gifts. They get him the bedside bassinet he’d had his eye on, and another box that Erik warns him not to open until after the party. Sean pesters Alex about seeing what’s inside, but Alex holds out (and he’s glad he does, because it ends up being a freaking breast pump and he doesn’t think he could have taken the embarrassment of opening that gift in front of the whole crowd).

That’s pretty much everything from Alex’s list. He doesn’t have a crib, but supposedly he won’t need one right away anyway, so he’ll have time to save up for that. The only other things from his original list are diapers and wipes. Erik’s been stockpiling those over the last few months by loading up when he sees a sale (thrifty motherfucker) and he’s made it clear that Alex can use what he needs out of the pile, and they’ll take the cost of it out of Alex’s state stipend.

Apart from that, Alex has everything he thinks he’s going to need. And he barely had to buy anything at all. It still makes Alex sort of uncomfortable that people are spending so much money on him (he doesn’t think he’ll ever really believe he deserves it), but he just keeps reminding himself that they’re gifts for the baby. And the baby deserves _everything_.

This kid, Alex thinks, touching his belly, is gonna be really freaking loved.

XXXXX

February and March are mostly a blur of awkwardness in his own body, becoming increasingly uncomfortable all the damn time, and practicing breathing techniques with Charles. That last part seems a little silly, but Charles is the only one of them who has been through this before, and if he says Alex needs to learn how to breath, then Alex believes him.

“You must find a pattern in your breathing,” Charles tells him. They’re doing pregnant-people yoga in the living room after school, and Alex is sort of failing at the whole thing.

“Right,” Alex says, sticking his tongue out slightly as he tries to copy Charles’s position. “A pattern.”

“Any pattern is fine. You have to choose what works best for you. It can be deep breaths, filling your diaphragm, or lighter breathing. So long as it helps you relax. You might do three quick breaths in succession and then, ‘Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear, etcetera, etcetera. When the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.’”

Alex says, “Huh, that sounds familiar. Did you just make that up? Wait, isn’t ‘little death’ an orgasm?”

Charles frowns and says, “Er… yes. Yes, it is. Those are also encouraged, as it happens. If you’re up for it.”

Sean says from the doorway, “I’m just going to go back downstairs now. You guys keep doing you.”

XXXXX

Alex spends a lot of quality time with the baby. Mostly because he doesn’t have a choice. The kid goes where Alex goes. There is no being alone when you’re seven months pregnant. Instead of alone time, Alex gets kicks to his rib cage, punches to his kidneys, and some creepy as fuck rolling shit that moves Alex’s whole belly when he’s lying down.

For all that, though, they manage a fair bit of just chilling together. Sometimes Alex goes up to his room while the others are downstairs and puts some music on his phone, and the two of them just listen to some tunes. Other times Alex reads out loud from his homework and the kid just listens. He hopes the kid is learning some stuff in there. Alex really wants his baby to be smart.

 _Of course he’ll be smart, Alex_ , Charles thinks at him, and Alex glares because Charles isn’t even in the room.

“My room is my sanctuary,” he shouts through the door. Is there no safe space from telepaths?

“He’s a nosy motherfucker,” Alex tells the baby.

The baby kicks Alex’s spleen. Alex decides to blame this on Charles also.

XXXXX

Alex is kind of weirded out by the direction his own thoughts take on this, but Charles is really fucking beautiful when he’s pregnant. It should look weird, a pregnant guy (Alex knows _he_ certainly looks weird, which is why he keeps his clothes loose and his head down at school), but somehow it doesn’t. Charles is all soft and round and skin is so fucking perfect. Pregnancy glow – that’s what it’s called, right? And sure, his ankles are swelling and his back is aching, just like Alex’s, but he’s still so fucking calm and confident and… fucking ethereal.

Alex isn’t the only one who’s noticed, either. David definitely has, and he’s been climbing all over Charles every chance he gets (which isn’t as often as it used to be because he’s too big for either of the preggos to pick up these days). But he’s still constantly rubbing his face all over Charles’s belly (it’s actually really comforting and sweet, and Alex is glad he, too, merits the treatment when he’s in range).

The other person who definitely notices is Erik. Erik is… usually pretty reserved. He mostly shows his emotions through either frowning, smiling scarily, or saying something sarcastic. He and Charles aren’t very touchy-feely (though they had been snuggled up awfully close the few times Alex has had to go into their room after bedtime), but you’d have to be an idiot not to see they’re in love. The way they can have a silent conversation without even looking at each other, it’s like they have complete access to one another’s minds. Or sometimes they _do_ look at each other and Erik will say something teasing and Charles will rise to the bait and that’s when the kids know it’s time to find somewhere else to be.

Sometimes, though, Alex catches Erik watching Charles when Charles doesn’t know it. The first time it ever happened was way back when Alex was new here and didn’t really know what he was seeing. But as Charles gets progressively more pregnant, the looks become more and more frequent. There’s got to be some part of Erik – some part way deep down in his boring German soul – that feels things like possession and longing, and as the baby becomes more visible, those emotions escape more and more often.

Someday Alex wants someone to look at him like that. He wants someone who will know what he’s thinking without having to ask, and will let him tease and know that’s just how he shows affection. He wants someone who will look at him like he’s the fucking sun, and won’t be put off by the side-effects of Alex having a baby inside of him.

Not that Alex is saying he’s going to go through this pregnancy bullshit again, not even for the perfect guy. This is it, a one-time deal.

He’s definitely sure about that. Totally, absolutely sure. Really.

XXXXX

Alex doesn’t know why it’s such a surprise when one day in April Charles comes to breakfast late and says, “Don’t be alarmed, but I’m in labor.”

Well of course everyone is fucking alarmed after that. It’s early morning, just before everyone is getting ready to head off to work or school, and it’s two weeks before Charles’s due date, so no one’s really expecting sudden fucking labor. There’s a lot of confusion about what everyone should do, but luckily Erik is a fucking god under pressure.

He says, “Ororo, Sean, finish eating. Then catch your bus.”

When Sean starts to argue, Erik shakes his head and says, “You don’t want to be here for this. There’s going to be blood.”

Sean goes a little paler than usual, and says, “Alright, alright.”

“What about me?” Alex asks, because his name wasn’t on that list.

“Finish feeding David, then take him to Raven’s.”

Then Erik turns and walks out of the room.

Alex says, “Uh, okay.”

Charles says, “I’m going to take a shower.”

He collects hugs from each of them, snuggles David for a long minute, then goes to start the shower. He’s in there for a long fucking time, too. Sean and Ororo leave, Alex takes David over to Raven’s, and when he comes back, the water is still running upstairs.

Erik, meanwhile, is done with whatever he had to do earlier and is now changing the sheets on his bed. He looks up when Alex wanders in.

“Mission accomplished?” he asks, and he’s still a fucking sarcastic bastard, even at a moment like this.

Alex gives him a jaunty salute in return. “She said to call if we need Azazel.”

Erik nods. “Good. If anything goes wrong, he’ll be faster than an ambulance.”

It’s a scary thought. Alex knows the reasons why this has to happen at home, and it’s not like the doctor isn’t going to be here. He knows, too, that women (and probably men with the x-gene, actually) have been having babies at home for hundreds of years. But that doesn’t make it less scary.

Alex helps Erik change the sheets on the bed to ones that are black, then helps him lay down towels. Then he goes to find the first aid kit, which has been expanded in the recent months to include things like a cord clamp and scissors and one of those water bottle things that you hose your junk off with.

After that, they just wait. Erik picks up his book from the nightstand and sits on the bed to read, while Alex takes a seat in the rocking chair in the corner. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he screws around on his phone and tries not to think about what’s coming. Erik, too, seems way more restless than usual. His book is open, but he’s not really flipping pages, just staring and the words and clenching his jaw.

Eventually, after probably an hour, Charles comes back. His hair is wet and his cheeks are flushed from the hot water. He hasn’t bothered getting dressed again, so Alex gets kind of a show before Erik snatches up a soft robe from the dresser and helps him into it.

“Thank you, love,” Charles says, and he brings a hand up to caress Erik’s cheek. Erik, in turn, puts his hand on the back of Charles’s neck. They stare into each other’s eyes in that intense way they sometimes do. Alex feels like he’s seeing something maybe he shouldn’t. This isn’t just like seeing someone’s naked body (he’s sure there’s going to be a whole lot of that today). No, this is like seeing someone’s soul.

Charles grimaces suddenly and Alex sees his hands clench. 

After the moment passes, Erik says, “How long?”

Charles says, “Fifteen minutes.”

That’s not close enough together to even call the doctor in, Alex knows. Erik probably already let her know what was happening when he disappeared earlier, but she doesn’t need to be here yet. It’s actually sort of frustrating, because after all the commotion downstairs, Alex wants something to start happening already. But labor, he knows, is a whole lot of waiting.

Charles sighs shakily and says, “Alex, walk with me.”

Alex dutifully pushes himself to his feet (and embarrassingly, has to wait a moment afterward to catch his balance), then shuffles after Charles down the hall. They probably look like two overweight ducks, waddling this way and that. They go down the stairs, then back up the stairs, then back to the bedroom where Charles has to have a lie-down. 

Alex goes to put the rice heating pad in the microwave, and as he’s coming back down the hall, he hears quiet voices. He stops just outside the door, because if they’re having a moment, he doesn’t want to ruin it.

Erik’s saying, “Gott, you’re beautiful.”

Charles laughs shakily and says, “You’d best put your glasses back on. I’m a mess and you know it.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive,” Erik says.

Charles laughs again, but it’s cut off by a groan as another contraction presumably hits him. Alex decides the hot pad might be of use right about now and goes inside the room.  
As soon as the contraction ends, Charles makes grabby hands in Alex’s direction.

The heat helps, and the walking helps, and Charles does his patterned breathing. Charles, it turns out, is a mostly quiet laborer, which is a bit surprising because he’s certainly not quiet at any other time. He lets out little grunts and groans now and then, but mostly when the pain comes, he goes silent, gritting his teeth, and clenching his hands. Sometimes Erik massages his shoulders and then Charles’s groans become louder and more pornographic, but Alex supposes those noises don’t really count.

Actually, Alex is kind of jealous, because he doesn’t think he’s going to be nearly as quiet. He’ll probably do some yelling, do some crying, and if he can’t control his powers, there may even be some plasma-blasting. Obviously that’s what they’ve been working to avoid these past few months of training and breathing exercises. 

Alex only hopes he can live up to the training.

XXXXX

After about two hours, with the contractions slowly becoming closer together, Erik steps out of the room to phone the doctor again.

Charles says, “This one’s going to be quick. I can feel it.”

“How quick is quick?” Alex asks, eyeing the doorway nervously. He is in no way qualified for this discussion and really wishes Erik would come back already.

“Maybe an hour,” Charles says. “With David it was more like six.”

“Oh god,” Alex says, shocked. “Six hours?”

“Well,” Charles says, and then has to stop talking to grit his teeth and ride out a contraction. Alex pushes the sweaty hair back out of his face, and leaves his hand there a moment when Charles leans into the touch.

When the contraction passes, Charles says, “Six hours for this part of it. The early part was probably another five. Then I pushed for maybe two hours after that.”

“That’s thirteen hours,” Alex says dumbly. He’d known, obviously, that labor could last a long time. He’s read the books. But it’s one thing to know intellectually that your labor could potentially last more than twelve hours, and it’s another thing entirely to hear it like this.

At least the immediacy of the situation right now means Alex doesn’t have much time to dwell on his own impending doom. Erik comes back after that and he’s just in time to hear Charles let out a breathy moan and then say, “Goddamn.”

Alex just stares at him, because he doesn’t think he’s ever heard Charles swear before. His heart is suddenly in his throat, thinking it must be something really fucking bad.

“What is it?” Erik asks calmly, but his jaw is clenched.

Charles grimaces and says, “Amniotic fluid. Erik, love, can you help me up?”

Erik does, and then Alex can see the towels they laid down earlier are soaked.

They stand their together, Charles holding tightly to Erik’s forearms to keep himself balanced. He’s shivering slightly, Alex can see, from the pain or from being wet.

Charles says, “I want another shower.”

Erik nods. “I’ll come,” he says, and probably he’s worried about Charles falling over. Alex doesn’t blame him.

Alex has a brief inappropriate thought about them in the shower together, but then shakes himself, because now is not the time, dammit. 

Erik says, “Alex, listen for the doorbell. The doctor should be here soon.”

Alex says, “Got it.”

When they’ve gone out to the bathroom, Alex also decides he’s going to change the towels on the bed, because he doesn’t want Charles to have to come back and not have a dry place to sit down. Actually _touching_ the wet towels is a little gross, but Alex has helped out with David enough to mostly be over having nasty stuff on his hands.

He puts the wet towels in the downstairs laundry and grabs new ones fresh out of the dryer. The stairs are a bit of a challenge (he’s fat and tired, okay?), but he manages. He’s just gotten the towels spread out on the bed when he hears the doorbell and has to go back downstairs to answer it.

It’s the doctor, of course, and she gives Alex a considering look as she comes inside.

“How’s your birth opening?” she asks him right off the bat. “Starting to form yet?”

Alex coughs, because he doesn’t want to think about her grabbing his junk every time he’s been back to see her.

“No,” he says, even though that’s not quite true. He’s been fucking tender down there for weeks and when he manages to get his hands down there (not an easy task) the skin feels tight and hot. It’ll be soon, but he doesn’t want to dwell on that.

She makes a hmm sound. “There’s still time,” she says. “Where’s Charles?”

“Shower,” Alex tells her. “He got, uh, kinda wet.”

She nods. “Lead the way.”

Erik and Charles are out of the shower and back in the bedroom by the time Alex manages to navigate the stairs again. Erik is fully dressed, though his hair is damp, but Charles is wearing what Alex might classify as a nightgown. Which makes sense, he guesses. There’s no dignity in childbirth. Or well, that’s not really true, but there’s no _shame_ in childbirth, anyway.

The doctor says, “How long?”

“Every three minutes,” Erik tells her.

Charles confirms this by groaning and clutching at Erik as his body shakes. Erik holds him up, lets him ride out the pain. Alex watches the clock on the nightstand. By the time it’s over, nearly a minute has gone by.

“Alright,” the doctor says. “On the bed. Let’s see how dilated you are.”

Charles doesn’t move, just leans his head into Erik’s chest and pants.

“Charles,” Erik says, voice soft.

Charles lets his head loll onto his shoulder to look up at Erik. His eyes are glassy, his mouth slightly open as he breathes.

“Can we get on the bed?” Erik asks. His voice is still so soft, and it rattles Alex, because he doesn’t know if he’s ever heard Erik talk like this before. Erik doesn’t _ask_ people to do things; he _tells_ them to do it. But this is definitely a question, and it’s a little bit scary to realize that.

Charles doesn’t say anything, but he nods jerkily and lets Erik help him onto his back on the bed. The doctor disappears momentarily, then comes back and grabs gloves from her medical bag. Then she settles herself down between Charles’s spread legs and does some poking all up in there.

“Almost eight,” she tells him.

Charles doesn’t seem to hear her. He doesn’t look at her or acknowledge her words. He’s only looking at Erik, who’s standing by the bed. They’re holding hands, and Alex wonders if this is some sort of coping technique or if they’re having a telepathic conversation.

Another contraction hits and Charles’s head thunks back against the bed as he rides it out. When it’s over, he doesn’t lift his head back up or even open his eyes, but he does squeeze Erik’s hand.

Erik takes a deep breath, and Alex sees his shoulders tense. Then he says in his normal commanding voice, “Sit up.”

Charles’s eyes snap open to look at him. His breathing is still ragged, but he looks more aware than he had just a second ago.

“Sit up,” Erik says again. He helps pull Charles into a sitting position, then climbs up onto the bed to hold him from behind.

“Breathe,” Erik tells him. He rests his head on Charles’s shoulder so they’re nearly cheek to cheek and he starts to breathe in the pattern Charles was using earlier.

Charles doesn’t do anything for a long moment, then he swallows and starts to copy Erik, to breath along with him.

Alex stands back and watches the whole thing, feeling useless and scared. Not like he thought labor would be a cakewalk, but he doesn’t like seeing Charles all disoriented and in pain like that. And even if Charles is handling it really fucking well, all things considered, how the hell is Alex ever going to do the same?

The doctor says, “Shouldn’t be long now,” in a quiet voice, and she’s talking to Alex, because Erik and Charles are in their own little world.

She’s not wrong; everything stays like that for another twenty minutes (Erik helping Charles breathe through the contractions, and Alex standing well back, watching in awe), but after a particularly rough contraction, all the tension goes out of Charles’s body and he sort of collapses back into Erik. Erik holds him steady. Alex waits for the next contraction to hit, but nothing happens for one minute, then another, then five minutes have gone by and nothing’s happening.

“Why’d they stop?” Alex asks.

The doctor is watching Charles closely, and keeps looking at her watch.

“Can I?” she asks Charles.

“Yes,” Charles says, and his voice is hoarse.

The doctor slips on a new pair of gloves, and then reaches down again between Charles’s legs to feel around.

“There’s definitely a baby in there,” she says. Alex stares at her, because he’s not sure if she’s joking or not. 

“You want to get up on your knees?” she asks, and Charles nods.

Erik helps him adjust positions and stays behind him so Charles can lean back against him still.

The doctor says, “Let’s get this gown off, too. Alex, we need the clamps, scissors, something for suction, and a soft towel.”

Alex fishes the first three things out of the first aid kit, but has to go downstairs for the last, because apparently neither he or Erik remembered that the baby was going to need wiped down after all this.

By the time he gets back up into the room, things are obviously moving quickly. Erik is all but holding Charles up, and the doctor has got both hands down there. She’s saying, “Push when you’re ready.”

Charles’s eyes are shut tight but he nods. There’s a moment when nothing happens, then his body starts to shake. The doctor says, “You’re doing great. One more.”

Charles’s body tightens again and this time, he cries out. Alex can’t look away from where there’s a fucking baby’s head coming out of him. Alex can see hair!

The doctor says, “Crowning.”

Charles pushes two more times before the baby’s head pops out, and he yells each time. Then there’s a moment where nothing happens except the doctor saying, “Almost out. One more push.”

Charles somehow manages that final push even though he looks fucking exhausted. And then suddenly there’s a real goddamn baby in the doctor’s gloved hands, and Alex is rushing forward with the towel because this kid is really fucking gross: slimy and covered in goo and blood. 

Erik lets Charles collapse back into a reclining position with Erik as his resting point. The doctor hands the baby up and settles it onto Charles’s chest. Alex hands Erik the towel and the suction bulb, and Erik manages to get the kid breathing and cleaned up a little bit without moving him away from Charles.

Charles, Alex notices suddenly, is crying a little bit. Not like he’s in pain, but like he’s really fucking happy. Alex feels himself tear up, too, just in sympathy and because that was the most intense thing he’s ever seen in his life.

After the baby’s for sure breathing on its own, the doctor strips off her gloves and goes to wash her hands again. While she’s gone, Alex dares to take a step closer to stare at the little thing. Specifically at her hair, which is dark and damp but also… kinda green.

“It’s a girl,” Erik tells him, and he doesn’t say anything about the hair.

Alex nods. “A mutant,” he says, because there’s no denying it now, not with hair like that.

Erik grins and says, “Yes. I can feel it.”

And that’s… really kind of weird. How would Erik be able to feel it? Just what kind of power does this baby have? And what’s it got to do with green hair?

Charles sniffs, pets the baby’s back with a shaking hand and says, “Lorna.”

“What?” Alex says.

“Her name,” Charles tells him. He doesn’t look away from the baby. His face is saying that he doesn’t care at all if she’s got green hair, because she’s here and she’s alive. “Lorna.”

The doctor comes back into the room and says, “So, you guys want a picture before it starts up again, or what?”

One for the life book, Alex figures, and he goes to find the camera.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it... the end of the road! Thank you guys so much for all the encouragement along the way!
> 
> I hope to write some more short pieces from Charles or Erik's perspective. There's also a tentative sequel in the works, but that might be a while.
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoy! Thanks again :)

Sean and Ororo both fall totally in love with the new baby. Not surprising – she’s really fucking cute. Ororo wants to hold her every chance she gets (which isn’t that often because that baby is on the tit more often than she’s not).

“She’s so little,” she says once when the baby is sort of awake and letting herself be held. “And she smells like lightning.”

Erik grins but says nothing.

Sean says, “It’s my turn to hold her, Ro!”

When she’s in his arms, he smiles and fawns over her and calls her “cutie” and is just generally nauseating about the whole thing. 

No one seems to give any fucks at all that the baby has green hair (though to be fair, Sean had done a really obvious double-take when he’d first seen her). 

“You assholes had better think my baby is just as cute,” Alex says for good measure, and then he has to grab David before the kid tries to climb up Sean’s legs to get to the baby.

David, too, is completely under Lorna’s spell. Every time she’s in the room, he wobbles over to whoever is holding her and demands to be picked up so he can see her and touch her. Alex was a little nervous about letting him touch her at first, since she’s obviously very delicate, but David seems to be able to sense that she’s less developed mentally than he is, and he’s always very gentle with her.

Alex hopes that gentleness will carry over to Alex’s kid, as well.

Sean says, “So when are you gonna pop?”

Alex says, “In my own damn time, so back off!”

Actually, Alex is pretty anxious for it to happen, too. He’s definitely ready to be done with this being-pregnant thing. He’s fat, his balance is shot to hell, he can’t get comfortable no matter what position he tries, and the baby is way too big to be cooped up inside him anymore, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps kicking around trying to make more space for himself.

It’s all extremely uncomfortable. So even though Alex is terrified of having to go through labor, he thinks it’ll be better just to get the whole thing over with already.

It doesn’t help either that his only distraction these days is the babies. Charles and Erik worked some kind of magic with the school to let Alex take his finals a month early. Which is good – he’s so obviously pregnant these days that even the self-absorbed assholes at school are sure to notice. But it does mean that for most of May Alex just stays at home and takes care of David while Charles focuses on Lorna, and then sometimes they switch out to let David gets some quality time with his papa while Alex minds the little one. And not that looking after babies isn’t exhausting (it definitely is), but Alex still has a lot of time to fret.

The Braxton-Hicks don’t help anything, either. Every time Alex thinks he might be in labor and starts to panic, he does some walking around or just shifts positions, and the contractions stop. The only real proof that labor is imminent is that the birth opening is definitely fully-formed by this point, which is super strange and a little humiliating, but also sort of sexy in a deeply disturbing way (Alex has had his fingers up there, and he’s really extremely ashamed to say he got himself off like that. It’s a secret he’ll take to his grave).

But anyway. Labor. Still scary as hell even after ( _especially_ after) watching Charles go through it. The thing is, Charles had relied pretty heavily on Erik through the entire experience, and Alex doesn’t actually have anyone he trusts like that. 

Well, he has Charles and Erik, and he knows they’ll help him through it. God knows there’s no one he’d rather rely on than those two (for this situation and every other). Alex has somehow managed to find himself in the middle of a real family, but even though they’ll help him through this, it’s not quite the same.

What Alex needs in this situation is a lover. And not just any lover, though. He doesn’t think the situation would be improved if he came clean to Todd Blanding and forced him to come to the birth. Probably that would make everything a whole lot worse (and anyway, Alex has already sworn to himself that Todd will never, ever know about this baby). But if there was someone who really loved Alex, who wouldn’t be ashamed to have put a baby inside him… well, that would be pretty alright. 

But that’s just a daydream. Alex is flying solo on this one. But at least he’s got his family to back him up.

XXXXX

It starts with some serious diarrhea, which is more than anyone else ever needs to find out about Alex’s body. The cramps start about mid-afternoon, and Alex mostly camps out in the bathroom until dinner, at which point he decides if labor is anything like what he just went through, he wants no part of that.

He goes downstairs for dinner even though he’s not especially hungry. He’s feeling sort of jittery and just picks at his food.

Erik frowns at him and says, “Are you having contractions?”

Alex says, “Ugh,” and rests his head on his arms.

“You should eat,” Charles tells him. He’s got the baby in one arm and is managing his fork with the other. He’s obviously a master at multitasking. “If you are going into labor, you’re going to be starving by the time it’s over.”

Alex says, “It’s not labor. I just… don’t feel good.”

Charles and Erik both give him a look like they don’t believe him.

They end up being right about the whole thing (like usual, those assholes) because Alex wakes up in the middle of the night in pain and also fucking soaked. 

“Um,” Alex says, looking around in confusion. He hasn’t actually wet the bed, right? He feels around in the dark, wondering if maybe he’s wrong and he’s actually just cold, not wet. But no, that’s definitely wetness, and please god don’t let it be blood. 

He reaches over with a shaky hand and turns on the lamp. To his relief, he sees that whatever this stuff is, it’s definitely clear.

“What the hell?” he says. 

Then he says, “Jesus fuck,” as the pain comes back.

When the pain (a real contraction, he guesses) passes, Alex says, _Help!_ and hopes Charles can hear him.

A moment later there’s a noise out in the hallway, then there’s a knock at Alex’s door.

“Alex,” Charles says. “I’m coming in.”

He doesn’t wait for Alex to respond, just opens the door. Erik’s right behind him.

Alex says, “Should have given me the plastic sheets. I knew it.”

Charles says, “Alex, don’t be ridiculous. We were never going to give you plastic sheets.”

Erik inspects the sheets (gross, so gross) and says, “Looks clear. No smell.”

“Don’t smell them!” Alex says, indignant and embarrassed. He’s been rolling around on those sheets for weeks and this wet stuff came _out of him_.

“Don’t be dramatic, Alex,” Charles says. “You’ll wake the children.”

Erik says, “You should shower. It will help with the pain. Do you need someone in there with you?”

Alex says, “Absolutely not.”

He takes himself off to the bathroom, where he sits in the tub and lets the water pound down around him. The contractions aren’t that close together – maybe ten minutes – but they’re kind of fucking painful. He doesn’t know if his legs would hold him long enough for a proper shower. Sitting, therefore, is infinitely preferable, but he read in one of those books that you shouldn’t take a bath after your water breaks (that’s obviously what that wet stuff was). So a shower sitting down it is.

He stays in there a really long time, until he thinks the contractions might be getting a little closer together. And also his hands start to get pruney, so he thinks he should probably get out. He doesn’t have the energy to dry himself off, so he just grabs the fluffiest towel in the cupboard and wraps it around himself as best he can (towels weren’t really made to go around pregnant people, so his ass is definitely sticking out. But fuck it, he’s in labor. He can do what he wants).

When he gets back to his room, Charles is waiting for him with his robe in one hand and the gown he wore when Loran was born in the other.

“Thought I’d give you the choice,” he says.

“Both,” Alex says, because he’s actually freaking freezing right now. It’s a little weird that to put on the clothes that Charles gave birth in, but they’ve been washed since then and Alex doesn’t actually have anything that will work for this situation. It’s either this or go naked.

Even knowing everyone is going to see his taint at some point, he’s just not ready for that.

XXXXX

Alex spends the next few hours trying to distract himself from the pain. He goes downstairs and plays WOW for a while, but he keeps getting killed when the contractions hit and he loses focus. Then he has to find his freaking body in ghost form, and that always takes ages. So eventually, he calls it quits on that.

There’s really not much to do, though. It’s the freaking middle of the night, and Alex is in too much pain to either do anything fun or to sleep. He ends up just pacing for a while (and sticking close to the wall because he needs the support and the balance.

Eventually, he exhausts himself and decides to go back upstairs and see if he can sleep through the pain. He can’t, not really, but he manages to catch some cat-naps, and then before he knows it, it’s morning and Sean and Ororo are up and getting ready for school.

The contractions keep on coming, just far enough apart not to do anybody any good. Alex’s entire body is sore by now, and he thinks, _labor can suck it._

Alex tries to muffle his groaning until the kids leave, but as soon as he hears the door close downstairs, he pushes himself up and goes to Charles’s room.

Charles opens the door right away when Alex knocks. He’s dressed now and is balancing Lorna in one arm while she feeds.

“Alex,” he says, and ushers him into the room. “Come in. How are you feeling? How far apart are the contractions now?”

Alex says, “Ugh,” and goes to lay down in Charles and Erik’s bed. It’s not just that the contractions are painful (though they really fucking are), it’s also that they’re never-ending. They just keep coming and coming and Alex has had about fucking enough. He’s done, just done.

Charles sits down on the bed next to him and starts to rub Alex’s back. It helps a little.

Charles says, “It’s alright, darling. You’re going to be okay. You’re strong. You can get through this. Have you had anything to drink?”

Alex shakes his head miserably.

“I’ll have Erik bring you something up. You can’t let yourself get dehydrated.”

Erik comes up a while after that with a glass of water and mug of green tea. He helps Alex sit up. His hands are surprisingly gentle, and Alex leans into him. Erik isn’t a lover, but he’s solid, at least, and Alex has never been more grateful for it.

XXXXX

Alex had been under the impression, during that early part of labor, that the contractions he was having were painful. But that was incorrect. It turns out, those were fucking mild. By mid-morning, the contractions are coming every five minutes, and they’re so goddamn strong Alex can’t walk or talk or think or even breathe while they’re happening.

Charles sits in front of Alex so they’re face to face, and he holds both of Alex’s hands in his, and he does the breathing patterns. Alex watches him and tries to copy him, but it’s really fucking hard and Alex hates it. He hates this whole stupid thing and he wishes it were over. But he’s barely half-way there and he knows it.

Alex isn’t ashamed to say that at one point he bursts into tears. Charles lets go of his hands and instead pulls him in close for a hug. His hugs are usually really fucking great, but today they’re just not cutting it. Charles doesn’t seem to mind, though, just lets Alex cry into his shoulder and rock against the pain, and he even rubs Alex’s back again. And then after that Erik lets Alex lean back against him while Charles rubs Alex’s feet, which are aching for some reason.

It’s complete bullshit, the whole thing, but at least Alex isn’t alone.

At last Erik says, “I’m going to phone the doctor.”

That seems like a good sign, Alex thinks. Maybe it’s almost over. Charles’s labor was almost over by the time the doctor got here.

But no. Alex should have known it wouldn’t work like that. Instead what happens is, Alex sweats and cries and shivers his way through five more hours of a labor. Five goddamn more hours! The doctor comes and she’s a total asshole like she’s always been but it’s worse now because she wants to feel Alex up, and Alex just wants her to go away because he hurts and he just wants to curl up in a ball and die and she won’t let him. She puts on her stupid gloves and puts her hand inside him, and tells, yep that’s a baby, like he couldn’t have fucking guessed that.

Then Charles says, “Alex, stay calm. Keep breathing. You know what’s at stake here.”

And Alex _does_ so he wipes his eyes and tries to get his shit together. And it works – briefly, until the next contraction hits, and then he’s all fucked up again.

Eventually the doctor says, “We’re almost there, kid. We’re transitioning.”

And Alex thinks that’s a good thing, but he’s so, so wrong. Because the next time the pain hits, it just stays and stays and stays, and it never goes away, and Alex thinks he’s going to puke, and suddenly Charles is there with a bucket and Erik pets Alex’s hair while he heaves, and then he starts to cry again and he can’t stop shivering but he doesn’t know if he’s hot or cold or if he’s ever going to feel anything but the pain again.

But then at last… it stops.

Alex is really fucking thirsty, but Erik’s there with a cup and a straw, and he helps Alex sit up again to drink. When Alex thinks he can talk again, he manages to say, “I quit.”

Erik says, “You’ll need a two-week notice for that. At least finish the working day.”

He thinks he’s so funny.

Charles says, “Alex, love, rest while you can.”

Alex closes his eyes and leans back against Erik, who’s at least warm and solid, even if he is a bastard.

Then, way too fucking soon, the pain starts up again. It’s not as bad this time, but there’s a lot of pressure now. It feels a lot like the diarrhea cramps from before this all started, that lifetime ago before Alex went into labor. Except, you know, a jillion times more painful.

The doctor says, “Let’s get you up into a better position.”

Then she and Erik together manage to haul Alex up onto his knees. Erik supports him there and Charles comes around the side and runs cool fingers through Alex’s hair. The doctor puts her hand between Alex’s legs and says, “I feel a head. You’ll know when to push, Alex.”

Alex say, “Fuck. You.”

But she’s right, that bitch, and he does feel it. He holds his breath and strains, and nothing happens except he can feel the baby just there inside him, and oh god, there’s so much pressure and it hurts so much. He doesn’t know if he can do this. He’s so fucking tired…

Then the contraction comes again, and Alex pushes this time without meaning to. It just happens on its own. The same thing happens the next time, and Alex pushes and he pushes and then suddenly there’s a burning, tearing pain shooting through him. It fucking hurts, but the doctor says, “Come on, Alex, another push,” and Alex thinks, fuck it, and gives it all he’s got. The pain gets worse and worse and Alex screams, but he keeps pushing. 

Then suddenly the pain is less intense.

“Head’s out,” the doctor says.

Charles says, “Almost there, love. Have you thought of a name?”

Alex knows he’s crying, but when the next contraction hits, he pushes through it. And then before he can even realize what’s happening, Erik is helping him slump backward and there’s a sticky, bloody, squirming baby on his chest. Alex’s entire body is shaking and he can’t stop crying, but he did it. It’s over, and his baby is really here.

Alex sniffles, and says, “S-scott.”

“What?” Erik says.

“His name,” Alex explains. “Scott.”

XXXXX

Of course, it’s not as easy as all that. Even after the baby comes out, Alex still has to push out the placenta, which is sick and Alex wishes he’d never seen it. Then he has to sit through the excruciating process of getting stiches in his downstairs, because apparently being sixteen doesn’t help your chances of not tearing when you’re pushing out a ten pound bowling ball. Alex can feel every time the needle goes in even though the doctor swears up and down she’d numbed him up first.

But eventually Alex gets to lay back with the baby on his chest (and an icepack on his crotch), and examine the little guy.

“He’s tiny,” he says, running a shaking finger along the baby’s cheek. “He felt really fat when he was inside me, but he’s so little.”

“He’ll grow quickly, never fear,” Charles says. “Do you want me to take him while you sleep?”

Alex yawns, and looks at the most beautiful little boy in the world. Ten little wrinkly fingers and ten little wrinkly toes. He’s got Alex’s nose. Alex never wants to stop holding him.

Alex says, “One more minute.”

He doesn’t remember closing his eyes. He does remember waking up to glare at the doctor when she starts pressing on his stomach (fucking ow, okay!), but he’s pretty groggy for that part and he falls back asleep immediately afterward. The next thing he really knows, he’s still in Charles and Erik’s bed under their warm blankets, and the light outside the window tells him it’s late afternoon.

It takes him a full minute to remember that’s he’s not pregnant anymore. He’s mostly just in a huge amount of pain in his downstairs and also really kind of fucking dizzy. As soon as he realizes what’s up, though, his heart starts to bang against his breastbone as he desperately cranes his head around, looking for his baby.

Charles appears like he’s been summoned then, and he’s got the kid in his arms. Alex holds out his hands silently, and Charles hands him over. The baby is awake, Alex can see, and his eyes are blue. His little mouth opens and closes.

“He’s hungry,” Charles says. “He’ll need to nurse.”

Alex says, “Ugh,” but pulls his nightgown down out of the way and brings the baby to his boob. 

Breastfeeding, it turns out, is nowhere near as fucking easy as Charles makes it seem. It’s hard and it’s painful and it takes all Alex’s fucking concentration to manage. You have to hold the baby exactly fucking right, and if the kid doesn’t have his mouth on the nipple in the perfect way then it really fucking hurts and also the kid won’t get anything out.

Luckily, Charles is some sort of expert and he helps Alex adjust his grip. When the baby’s mouth closes over his nipple this time, it still kind of hurts, but it also make something go warm and tingly inside him.

Alex watches him eat for a while like a creeper and thinks, _holy shit, I made this thing._

Alex doesn’t ever want to stop looking at the baby, but after the kid’s gotten as much as he’s going to out of Alex and seems content with that, Alex adjusts him in his arms (thank god for all that practice with Lorna). Once the baby (Scott, Alex has to remember to call him that) is settled and only a little whiny, Alex says to Charles, “So I guess you want your bed back, huh? Sorry I bled all over it.”

Charles says, “There’s no rush, but when you’re ready, Erik and the children have put something together for you.”

Well, Alex can’t not go look after that. Getting up is crazy painful (he doesn’t think his balls will ever be the same after this), but he manages to waddle down the hallway and into his own room.

There, along one wall, is… a crib. Not just a plastic cheap one, either. It’s a fucking full-sized wooden crib, the kind that has to cost a few hundred dollars at least. 

Alex stares at it, dumbfounded. 

“What?” he says.

Erik appears out of nowhere. He leans against the doorframe and says, “It’s a gift. From the family. All of us.”

Alex says, “It’s too expensive!”

Charles says, “We didn’t get to spoil you when you were younger, Alex, and it’s a shame. Let us make up for that now. I know you’re practically an adult and you have a little one of your own now, but let us spoil you just this once, alright?”

It might be the hormones and it might be how tired Alex still is. Either way, he starts to cry again.

And then he sees the crib is decorated in reds and greens and purples, all clashing together, and he thinks, fuck this family, they’re all assholes, and he cries even harder.

XXXXX

Alex loves just looking at Scott. Sometimes he’ll literally sit there for half an hour with Scott in his arms just to watch him sleep. He legit cannot believe this perfect little thing came out of him. Ten months ago, this baby was nothing more than jizz, and now he’s a living, breathing, perfect little person.

Scott is beautiful. He doesn’t have much hair, but Charles assures Alex that the bald patches will fill in after a few months. But even without the hair, he’s still so fucking cute. His little nose and his big blue eyes. His tiny ears. His little fingers that will wrap around Alex’s finger as if he’s saying, stay with me, Daddy.

Alex never knew he could feel this way about another person. There’s just so much fucking love, and Alex doesn’t know what to do with it all. It makes his eyes prickle and his chest feel tight. It could just be the hormones, but Alex wants to cry every time he looks at Scott. It’s fucking scary, but Alex wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Ororo and Sean do, in fact, think Scott is just as cute as Lorna. Apparently when they came home from school that first day – and after they’d gotten over the shock of Alex having had a freaking baby while they were in class learning math and English and stuff – they both wanted to hold him right away. Charles had made them wait, though, until Alex woke up. Instead he’d kept a firm hold on Scott and had Erik distract the kids with getting the crib set up in Alex’s room.

Later in the evening, though, Alex is awake and aware enough to give them permission to hold Scott. The idea actually scares him more than it should for some reason. He knows he’s being ridiculous, and Sean and Ororo have both held lots of babies, but it still makes his palms sweat as he watches.

When it’s Ororo’s turn to hold him, she sniffs Scott’s hair and frowns thoughtfully.

“What’s he smell like?” Alex asks. He knows objectively what Scott smells like (he’s done a good deal of sniffing himself in that general area), but Ororo had had a unique perspective on Lorna and Alex is curious.

Ororo says, “Just like a baby.”

Alex says, “Oh,” kind of disappointed. It’s not that he’ll love the kid any less if he turns out to be completely human, but he doesn’t think it’s quite fair, either. Imagine growing up in a house full of mutants and being the only one without a power.

_I wouldn’t worry about that_ , Charles tells him silently. _But I think he’ll probably need a few years before he comes into his own._

Alex’s heart does a strange sort of flip in relief. That’s… that’s really good. But also kind of scary. Alex barely has control over his own power (though he does consider getting through fucking labor without exploding a major victory). How is he going to help Scott keep his gift (whatever that may be) under control?

Alex thinks, _You’ll help me help him learn?_

Charles smiles and says, _In time, of course._

And that’s fine. Alex has got all the time in the world.

XXXXX

Of course, actually having a baby is nothing Alex could have ever prepared himself for. Having a baby means sleeping in three hour cat-naps between feedings, and changing meconium diapers. Having a baby means Alex’s nipples start to crack and his clothes constantly have spit-up on them. Having a baby means losing his baby-weight pound by fucking pound doing the rock-n-walk because the kid starts to cry when you put him down.

In other words, having a baby is complete crap, but Alex loves the kid anyway. And he’s at least got family to take the kid off his hands when he thinks he’s going to start losing it. 

Somehow, they manage to survive the first growth spurt together, and then the first milestone (smiling, of all things, and it’s cute enough to make up for the fit the kid pitches during the weeks before and after).

Having a baby means Alex gets to hold Scott close at night and rock him to sleep, and hum songs he can’t quite remember the words to that he thinks his mother must have sung to him. He thinks she’d be proud of him and of this grandbaby. And when Scott gets old enough, Alex will show him the pictures of his bio-grandparents, and maybe Scott will be proud to have them, too.

Having a baby means Alex lies awake at night and worries that he’s going to fuck the kid up in some irreversible way. Charles tells him that fear never really goes away, though it does get easier to bear. Like everything else about parenting, Alex guesses.

Alex turns seventeen on a random Saturday when Scott is three months old. Alex doesn’t even remember what day it is until he comes downstairs with the baby on the tit (he’s long since stopped being embarrassed about that), to find presents on the table with breakfast.

Alex says, “What’s the occasion?” and then remembers and feels like an idiot.

When Scott’s done eating, Alex hands him off to Ororo, who cuddles him close. Then he pulls the nearest present toward him. He ends up getting: a new book on volcanoes to add to his collection (and to read while he’s rocking Scott to sleep and being bored), a gift card for a massage (oh yes please), and a few cool odds and ends.

Alex says, “Thanks, guys.”

In an idle moment after breakfast, Alex is sitting on the couch flipping through his new book, but really actually thinking about life. It’s still a crazy coincidence that he ended up here of all places. What are the odds that Moira ended up sending him to the one foster home in all of New York that had all the things he needed?

He must be thinking it pretty loudly, because Charles sits down next to him – David hanging off his pantleg and Lorna in his arms – and says, “You know, Alex, if you try sometimes, well you just might find you get what you need.”

Alex thinks about this. He says, “You listen to the Rolling Stones in the shower this morning?”

Charles says, “I thought I’d picked it up from a fortune cookie, but now that you mention it, I did have the radio on classic rock. Is that a deal-breaker for you?”

Alex says, “Nah, it’s all good.”

XXXXX

By the time Scott is six month old and Alex is back in school for his senior year, Alex thinks he’s pretty much gotten this whole parenting thing under control. Except, okay, that’s a complete lie. Parenting is fucking hard, and Scott is a total brat sometimes, and Alex has had so many fucking breakdowns that he’s gotten really great at crying silently while the kid’s asleep.

Being in school and being away from Scott is hard in a lot of ways, but Alex is also really grateful for the break. Maybe that makes him a terrible parent, but school is like a separate world, one where Alex can just be himself and doesn’t have to be someone’s father. Alex doesn’t know how stay-at-home parents do it, honestly, but he’s got a great deal of respect for them. If Alex had to be at home all day every day with Scott and Lorna and David, he’d very quickly go insane. 

But that’s not the whole story. It’s not like Alex hates having a kid. Alex sometimes looks at Scott or watches him while he’s sleeping, and he can’t even think because of how in love he is. Sometimes Scott will hiccup or smile or bring a sticky hand up to smack Alex under the chin, and Alex will just melt.

So it’s not fun, this parenting gig, but it’s worth it.

And luckily, Alex’s crazy family is still totally on board to help him out. Raven watches the kids while Alex is at school, and after school, Sean and Ororo are always willing to hold Scott for a while if Alex needs to get something done. Charles and Erik, of course, are fucking saints and don’t make Alex pay nearly as much as he should for diapers and wipes, and they give Alex the kind of advice you can only get from other parents. Even little David pitches in, petting Scott’s head and calming him down (an uncontrolled side-effect of his telepathy that Charles is a little worried about, but is really useful at times). And, once they get old enough to recognize each other, Scott and Lorna become great friends, sharing their toys and playing little games together (although, okay, there are a few slap fights now and then… whoops!).

It’s definitely a full house, and pretty much everyone in it is completely crazy. But that’s not a bad thing.

Then one day in mid-October, about a year after Alex came to live here, Charles says one night, “I was thinking about inviting my TA home for dinner. I don’t think he has any family in the area and he feels rather lonely.”

And Alex thinks, yeah, okay. Always room for one more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: You guys probably all know who I want to be the mysterious TA. And I’m actually trying to put together a sequel wherein he becomes Alex’s foreverguy. But until that happens… feel free to insert your favorite Alex pairing here.


End file.
